Race Against Time: Searching For Hope in AIDS-Ravaged Africa - Style

Style

The writing style reflects the author's intent to use the text for a lecture series. The narration addresses the audience while guiding it through explanations of the issues and anecdotal illustrations. Lewis' charismatic, eloquent, and energetic oration style is reflected in the writing. The tone has been described as loud and persuasive. One reviewer called it "vintage Lewis – incisive criticism leavened with high-blown rhetoric". The book focuses more upon real-world human experiences, rather than numbers and statistics, in discussing the effect of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and the world's response. Lewis' eyewitness accounts are candid and vivid. For example, he recounts tours of hospitals and schools as he explains the dire straits of national health and education sectors, and he describes meetings with diplomats and staff from the UN, World Bank, and IMF as he explains their effect on foreign aid policies. The book is written from an idealistic perspective and, despite the anger and underlying sense of guilt, Lewis remains optimistic. While he was a professional diplomat, his memoir-style reflections on specific people, such as Michel Camdessus, Carol Bellamy, and Thabo Mbeki were called undiplomatic. Despite the book's undiplomatic style, Lewis retained his post as a UN Special Envoy until the term completed in December 2006.