By Michael McColly
[Soft Skull Press, Transition Books, 2006. 360 pages.
$15.95 paperback]
Reviewed by Lott Hill

In The After-Death Room, Michael McColly takes us on a journey around the world as he attempts to understand the global struggle to combat HIV and AIDS while confronting the virus inside his own body. The book is a combination of journalism, memoir, travel journal, confessional, and personal discovery for McColly as he contemplates the role of yoga in his own health and teaches others how such practice may help them live healthier lives. From South Africa, to Thailand, to India, to Vietnam, to Senegal, we follow the writer to communities that are on the frontlines in the battle against HIV and meet individuals who have dedicated their lives to stopping the spread of the virus.

McColly finds his way through determination and luck, as he travels around the world and meets the people who are treating, preventing, educating about, and/or living with HIV and AIDS. These remarkable activists and their stories represent so many others in similar circumstances around the world, yet McColly’s interaction with each one underscores the immense and unique challenges they face. He writes: “Like the virus, the work of activists and their organizations replicates [itself], latching on to new sources of strength in order to distribute its message ever more broadly. This organic social movement spreads resistance not only to the indifferent biological machinery of HIV, but also to the more deadly indifference of human beings to the suffering that surrounds them.”

But the people McColly encounters are anything but indifferent, and whether they run the community-based organizations and clinics in Chennai, India, or treat the incarcerated patients at the Cermack Health Center of Cook County Jail, they become the source of hope in this story.