Love is the Cure (on Life, Loss and the End of AIDS) Sir Elton John Hachette RRP: $39.99 Love is the Cure is Elton John's somewhat self-serving but ultimately satisfying autobiography. Much murky water has passed under this phenomenally-talented gay entertainer's bridge which does not appear here, so there is clearly much tucked away for further installments. What he thought he was doing marrying, in 1984 in Sydney, sound engineer Renate Blauel is one of my own personal top ten questions about John which we will have to wait a while longer to be told about. But, in seizing on what is probably the most admirable episode in his life - the setting up and maintaining of a successful international HIV/AIDS charitable fund - and putting it into context as the pinnacle of his climb out of drug addiction hell, John and his presumably small army of researchers and ghost writers, have produced a rather compelling book. Love is the Cure's nicely judged and informative timeline of the emergence of HIV, of the AIDS catastrophies visited on communties, gay and straight, around the world and of the heroic work done to limit the global pandemic is worth reading for itself. For anyone who wants an easy-access recounting of how we got to the current stage of HIV infections, of what we and the world went through, this is good stuff. There's just enough gushy but well-intentioned celebrity name-dropping of the likes of Freddie Mercury, Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Diana and Rock Hudson to satisfy the most tabloid of tastes. And he fingers those in high places, particularly in the USA, who could have made a difference but didn't, generally calling a spade a spade. Despite its overly-simplistic 'musos sing their hearts out for world peace' premise, that if we can all just learn to love each other HIV will disappear, all up, at a number of levels Love is the Cure is well worth reading. - Jay Bennie Jay Bennie - 16th August 2012