Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic
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Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic
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Narrated by:
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Paul Woodson
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Written by:
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Richard A. McKay
About this listen
In Patient Zero, Richard A. McKay presents a carefully documented and sensitively written account of the life of Gaetan Dugas, a gay man whose skin cancer diagnosis in 1980 took on very different meanings as the HIV/AIDS epidemic developed - and who received widespread posthumous infamy when he was incorrectly identified as patient zero of the North American outbreak.
McKay shows how investigators from the US Centers for Disease Control inadvertently created the term amid their early research into the emerging health crisis; how an ambitious journalist dramatically amplified the idea in his determination to reframe national debates about AIDS; and how many individuals grappled with the notion of patient zero-adopting, challenging, and redirecting its powerful meanings - as they tried to make sense of and respond to the first 15 years of an unfolding epidemic. With important insights for our interconnected age, Patient Zero untangles the complex process by which individuals and groups create meaning and allocate blame when faced with new disease threats. What McKay gives us here is myth-smashing revisionist history at its best.
©2017 The University of Chicago (P)2017 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksWhat listeners say about Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Anonymous User
- 2021-11-05
An enlightening journey. Highly recommended.
Great book! This story wraps hard data, love and compassion together in a vivid portrait of a man. It reminds me how important it is to always consider the other side of any story.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 2024-06-12
Canadian angle on the AIDS epidemic was refreshing to hear
I feel like the victim shaming of Gaetan Dugas as patient zero was awful for him and his family. This book seeks to rectify the wrongs that were done to slander a young gay man as the reason for spreading the virus to North America unjustified. I liked hearing about the Canadian perspective of how the federal government and provincial governments tackled the emergence of AIDS in Canada (aka poorly). We hear a lot about American perspectives in health science so I appreciated this a lot.
I gave a 4 on performance as I felt the mispronouncing of French Quebecois names, accents, and others was woefully inadequate in the second half of the book. It was distracting and I cringed. The narrator might have hired a dialect coach for assistance. If that wasn’t available, keeping things consistently anglicized would be ok.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Bunny Perno-Horne
- 2022-03-23
FASCINATIG
I enjoyed this so much that I played some chapters multiple times. A captivating read.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Effie
- 2022-08-11
An incredible book, badly read
This book offers an absolutely gripping and engaging historiography of the early AIDS pandemic and the shameful scapegoating of Gaëtan Dugas — one that is unfortunately undermined in audio form by the performance of narrator Paul Woodson. Perhaps the greatest strength of the text is the uniquely Canadian perspective offered by author Richard A. McKay. It’s unfortunate, then, that the publisher chose to select a performer to narrate the book with such an obvious unfamiliarity with the country and its culture. Woodson’s frequent, repeated mispronunciation of familiar Canadian names like Mulroney, Maclean’s, and Levesque (not to mention his comical overpronunciation of the name Gaëtan) are a constantly jarring reminder of the American narrator’s absolute disconnect from the text’s throughly Canadian subject matter. For a book where the author’s particular Canadian perspective is so essential to the text, this is a pretty inexcusable oversight. McKay’s work deserves a lot better than this.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- HittsMcGee
- 2018-08-06
Was Dugas a modern Typhoid Mary?
An important perspective on how North America reacted to the mysterious disease that predominantly affected gay men, caused several strange symptoms, and whose cause was unknown. As people have done for all of history, fingers were pointed at a single man and his promiscuous behaviour. In this novel, McKay does a great job of explaining why and how the Patient Zero narrative was invented. In fact, which he prodigiously attempts to reverse the harm caused by the narrative, and focusses on the human side of such a tragedy.
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3 people found this helpful