Description:
Three decades old and counting, the worldwide AIDS epidemic has touched millions of lives. It has also yielded a sorrowful library of memoirs and tributes, among the most memorable entries in which is this compelling portrait of a child born into illness and determined to beat it. Born of a Navajo mother, Nasdijj met 11-year-old Awee while still mourning the loss of his own son. "AIDS had knocked him out," Nasdijj writes. "But Awee was a fighter. He always got back up again." Determined to help Awee in that fight, Nasdijj recounts the miseries of dealing with indifferent doctors and Indian-agency bureaucrats ("Anglos," he writes, "would never tolerate the kinds of limited options Indians have to live with every day"), of seeking avenues of relief from pain that lead into back alleys and other tortured lives, of finding reasons for hope against an ever-stronger enemy--one of whose most powerful guises, he tells us, is loneliness. "Why would anyone sane adopt a child with AIDS?" Nasdijj writes, answering his own question: "Because one comes to you. Because you can." This tragic, beautifully written memoir encourages us all to do more. --Gregory McNamee
| 
