The definitive and revelatory account of the origins of HIV and the causes of the AIDS pandemic In this groundbreaking work that reads like a detective novel, longtime Washington Postreporter Craig Timberg and award-winning AIDS researcher Daniel Halperin tell the surprising story of how Western colonial powers unwittingly sparked the AIDS epidemic and then fanned the flames. Drawing on remarkable new science, Tinderboxoverturns the conventional wisdom on the origins of this deadly pandemic, and in a riveting narrative that stretches from colonial Leopoldville to 1980s San Francisco to South Africa today, it reveals how human hands unleashed this epidemic and can now overcome it, if only we learn the lessons of the past.