Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It

"Remarkable... reads like a detective novel."—The New Yorker

In this groundbreaking work that reads like a detective novel, longtime Washington Post reporter Craig Timberg and award-winning AIDS researcher Daniel Halperin tell the surprising story of how Western colonial powers unwittingly sparked the AIDS epidemic and then fanned the flames. Drawing on remarkable new science, Tinderbox overturns the conventional wisdom on the origins of this deadly pandemic, and in a riveting narrative that stretches from colonial Leopoldville to 1980s San Francisco to South Africa today, it reveals how human hands unleashed this epidemic and can now overcome it, if only we learn the lessons of the past.