SOURCE: Roudiez, Leon S. Review of AIDS and Its Metaphors, by Susan Sontag. World Literature Today 63, no. 4 (autumn 1989): 685.

In the following review, Roudiez contends that AIDS and Its Metaphors is not as cohesive as Illness as Metaphor, but contends that the new essay effectively clarifies confusing facts and misconceptions regarding AIDS.

In Illness as Metaphor (1977) Susan Sontag had contrasted tuberculosis, the disease that the nineteenth century found “interesting” and even “romantic,” with the “great epidemic diseases of the past, which strike each person as a member of an afflicted community.” In the seventies it was indeed assumed that such major epidemics were a curse of the past; and then AIDS burst upon us—or rather, it spread to the West and spawned a primal fear expressed by means of ugly metaphors.

These metaphors are viewed by [in AIDS and Its Metaphors] Sontag as having been produced by the...