My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People

Written by an extremely perceptive and empathetic immigrant physician working in northeastern Tennessee, My Own Country recounts the AIDS epidemic’s arrival in 1980s rural America. Like the best works of non-fiction, the book covers a much broader range of topics than its immediate subject — ignorance and prejudice, the role of privacy and confidentiality between doctors and patients, flaws in health care delivery, the demands a physician’s job places on his personal life, the outsider status of an immigrant in a white working-class community, and the fears of a disease whose transmission mechanisms were at the time not fully known. Out of all of the books about the AIDS epidemic, fiction or non-fiction, this is one of the best.