Self-made impresario, controversial producer, contentious champion of human rights and the First Amendment, founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival, and unquestionably the most dynamic force in American theatre in the last quarter century, Joseph Papp (1921-1991) changed forever America's cultural landscape. He was the first to demand and to provide,against enormous odds,free Shakespeare to the public, and the first to pioneer colourblind casting and minority-group theatre. He discovered and showcased at the Public theatre playwrights like David Rabe, John Guare, and Vaclav Havel directors like Michael Bennet and James Lapine actors like Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Denzel Washington and produced such classic American plays as Hair, Sticks and Bones, Streamers, The Normal Heart , and A Chorus Line, the longest running musical in Broadway history. Joe Papp offers readers a compassionate, unsparing portrait of a complex man who inspired both anger and admiration, but whose far-reaching impact on American theatre remains unsurpassed.

A New York Times Notable Book of 2007

"The Invisible Cure" is an account of Africa's AIDS epidemic from the inside--a revelatory dispatch from the intersection of village life, government intervention, and international aid. Helen Epstein left her job in the US in 1993 to move to Uganda, where she began work on a test vaccine for HIV. Once there, she met patients, doctors, politicians, and aid workers, and began exploring the problem of AIDS in Africa through the lenses of medicine, politics, economics, and sociology. Amid the catastrophic failure to reverse the epidemic, she discovered a village-based solution that could prove more effective than any network of government intervention and international aid, an intuitive response that calls into question many of the fundamental assumptions about the AIDS in Africa.

Written with conviction, knowledge, and insight, "The Invisible Cure" will change how we think about the worst health crisis of the past century--and indeed about every issue of global public health.