Condom Sense: A Guide to Sexual Survival in the New Millennium

In a forthright, practical handbook, Sweeney (aided by co-author Grisman) delivers her urgent message: ""a condom can keep you from dying."" The v-p of medical affairs at New York's Bedford-Stuyvesant Family Health Center and a member of the President's Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, Sweeney marshals sobering statistics (there are 47 million people with AIDS worldwide; by 2001, there were 15 million children orphaned by the disease) and delivers firm recommendations to sexually active Americans (""Make an appointment. Get the test. Make those calls. Use protection. That's how the spread of AIDS stops""). While HIV-cocktails are expensive and far from universally available, and an AIDS vaccine is years in the future, condoms are cheap and plentiful, Sweeney says, and anyone-church, organization, political party-that withholds information about sex and condom use is ""condemning people to death."" Sweeney's hard-line position may scare some sexually active people-and as long as it scares them into having protected sex, that's just fine with her.