LET'S be clear: the awardwinning Canadian reporter Stephanie Nolen has written a book that you don't want to read.

For all the pleasing typography, and pictures, the content of 28 Stories of Aids in Africa is inescapably depressing. But someone had to write an update, lest we forget that this chronic ailment in rich nations remains a killer plague in Africa. To help us swallow the pill, Nolen's portraits of amazing people living or working with the virus are readable in a storytelling style that approaches that of Alexander McCall Smith.

Nolen has been reporting on Aids for nine years and seen Africa progress from total denial to partial acceptance and the arrival of anti-retroviral drugs for more than one million people.

Her choice of 28 portraits in 14 countries . . . activists, orphans, a prostitute, a migrant mineworker, a truck driver, a scientist . . . provides a microcosm of the ever-increasing circles of impact.

"On paper it was one in six adults in Malawi, " she writes.

"But in this village it was hundreds of people. If they weren't sick themselves, they were caring for the sick, sheltering their sisters' orphans, their dead brother's wife and baby. One way or another, everyone had the disease."

One compelling story is that of Ethiopian army lieutenant Andualem Ayalew, who contracted HIV from prostitutes while serving in the war against Eritrea. Disgraced and discharged, he picked himself up, walked onto a parade ground and staged his first Aids-education talk. Soon he was touring barracks armed with a wooden penis and condoms.

To South African activist Zackie Achmat, the battle against Aids is a war, much as was the struggle against apartheid.

To win the right to access to drugs from a government in denial until last year, campaigners fought against multinational companies and the stupidity of ministers until all were shamed into action.

Nolen's book has the merit of being a historical record. But she could have allowed herself to conclude with some hard-hitting questions. Where's the food and clean water for people now given strong drugs? Who will tackle the intolerable reality that people offered free antiretrovirals are dying because they cannot afford the bus fare to fetch them?

Finally, now that HIV-positive people in rich countries can be kept alive on a lifelong regime of lucrative drugs, will pharmaceutical companies bother to develop the only real solution for the poor . . . a vaccine?