Private Acts, Social Consequences by Ronald Bayer (New York: Free Press; 1989)

Bayer's approach is most effective when he uses it to describe the politicized nature of AIDS policy in the United States. He succeeds in showing the reader that public health authorities dealing with the spread of HIV/AIDS had a wide variety of competing interests to take into account in formulating AIDS social policy and that political interest groups, most notably gay community organizations, played a large role in fashioning AIDS policy. Those who might have doubted the significance of contextual factors such as these for health policy, and especially for AIDS policy, will be convinced of it after reading Bayer's book. But Bayer is not content to make only descriptive claims about AIDS health policy. He is also interested in advancing normative and prescriptive claims, the nature of which, I have argued, requires an approach other than the one that he has adopted.