Aidsafari: a memoir of my journey with AIDS

by adam-levin

With searing honesty, tender prose and outrageous humour, Adam Levin takes us through the daily trials of living with Aids, travelling from promiscuity and dangerous denial, through the terrors of imminent mortality, to face the realities of his disease. But this book's power lies not only in its value as a guide for coping with life-threatening illnesses, but in the rich quality of the narrative. Levin journeyed to remote, unimagined places to write The wonder safaris, but it is his Aidsafari - the frightening, internal journey that kept him on his sickbed for two years - that ultimately reveals his raw honesty, indomitable passion and remarkable insights about love, lostness and life, and how rarely it fails to surprise us. (blurb)

230 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Hjwoodward · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this book with much trepidation, thinking it was going to be rawther harrowing and not really relevant to me. Well, I was surprised and delighted on both counts! Thoroughly absorbing and relevant to anyone who has lived closely with someone with a life-threatening illness. Particularly enlightening was how one has to adjust to chronic pain, to a new normal, to feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Every now and then I was reminded of a velvet rage, of the need to be flamboyant ... I liked that though - and there were one or two real pearls of wisdom strewn in, which I fell on greedily like my dog digging for mole-rats! Here's one that had particular resonance for me: "All my life, I had held the greatest respect for those brave individuals who didn't give a tin of paint what people said, but celebrated life and their own freakishness with gusto." Well said, Adam, well put, and sounds like a description of you and me too.

[Namhla · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know what? Hell yeah! This book is just surrounded by friendship and never giving up. The amount of support the author receives brings me to tears. Being a free judgment zone is what we all need to thrive, just a little more positivity.

[LeAnne · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The world has AIDS,” writes Adam Levin. “And if you give a shit about the world, you have it too.” Far from depressing, this is a fascinating and witty account of Levin’s two years struggling to come to terms with a disease he denied until he was nearly on his death bed. His journal entries show us one view of what it feels like physically and emotionally to be on the AIDS treatment roller coaster. The author is very much aware of how different his experience is as a relatively well-to-do member of a supportive family from the vast majority of AIDS sufferers in South Africa whose treatment options are limited by poverty.

Levin is unabashedly gay. Although he is no longer attracted to the shallowness of most clubbing relationships, he has not ‘found Jesus,’ as he puts it, although he has moved from confirmed atheism to some kind of belief in miracles and a Higher Power. The book is full of insights into homosexuality and the gay clubbing world invisible to the rest of us.

[Tandi Mapukata · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an engaging experience, brutally frank, blow by blow account of staring death in the face as a young white, middle class SA male.