Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, has written When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa (University of California Press, 2007). The work explores one of the most tragic stories of the global AIDS crisis—the failure of the ANC government to stem the tide of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa—and traces the deep roots of the AIDS crisis to apartheid and, before that, to the colonial period. Basing his discussion on ethnographical data collected in the townships of Johannesburg, he demonstrates that the unprecedented epidemiological crisis in South Africa is a demographic catastrophe as well as a human tragedy, one that cannot be understood without reference to the social history of the country, in particular to institutionalized racial inequality as the fundamental principle of government during the past century.