Excerpt from The Invisible People by Greg Behrman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

If, as the Chinese philosopher Sun-Tsu suggested, every battle is won or lost before it is even fought, then the U.S. response to the pandemic would be framed from the get-go to fight a losing battle. Enlisting USAID to tackle the pandemic was, in the words of a former National Security Council director, "like asking the JV team to come and play the Giants."

The decision of just what to do with those inaugural $2 million would fall, along with the very mantle of commandeering the U.S. response to the burgeoning pandemic, into the lap of a neophyte entirely green to the world of Washington bureaucracy and politics, a thirty-year-old fresh-faced doctor hired to work on diarrheal disease with no experience in AIDS.

Copyright © 2004 by Greg Marc Behrman.  From The Invisible People, pages vii-xiv (Preface) and pages 1-21 (Chapter One)