Other books by the author




Pig: A Memoir

This is a very funny book about talking pigs that is destined to become an international bestseller. But it is so much more than that.

As African Swine Fever Virus, a deadly virus that infects pigs, threatens to spread into Western Europe and may even reach America, the timing of this novel could not be more perfect. As fears grow that the virus might be capable of infecting humans, this book raises troubling questions about the honesty and competence of public health officials. Could the next human epidemic be lurking in pigs? Has a pig virus already quietly infected us and is it responsible for mysterious illnesses like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and autism?


Is African Swine Fever virus already infecting American pigs and being covered up? With incisive political satire,  Pig: A Memoir explains how that could easily be done by government scientists who can always rename diseases  in order to hide them. Pig: A Memoir shows how the game is played.

Pig: A Memoir, which appears 70 years after Animal Farm, updates the political and existential status of man and pig in a laugh-out-loud, mini-epic of a narrative that readers everywhere will be quoting at the water cooler. Pig: A Memoir has so many dynamic moving parts that it reads like it is reflecting the state of our world in real time.

A contemporary allegorical fable about the overlapping breakdown of the porcine and human public health systems, Charles Ortleb's little masterpiece is full of the absurd zaniness of
Catch-22 and the gritty horror of The Jungle. He has used his journalistic, critical, and comedic skills to expose our planet's newest biomedical Silent Spring.

Some will call
Pig: A Memoir an edgy, postmodern, meta-satire, while others will deem it a jolly good tale that opens our eyes to the situation of the human-like pigs and porcine humans in our midst. In the upside-down world of Pig: A Memoir, the pigs talk and the humans oink. The pigs are more terrified of getting cockamamie diseases from humans than the humans are of getting them from pigs.

One never escapes the feeling in
Pig: A Memoir, that Ortleb has strategically nailed something utterly monstrous that will one day bite us all on the ass, if it hasn't already. This provocative and hilarious book is as wild and crazy as a fox. A literary and philosophical torch has been passed from Orwell to Ortleb. The world has a new classic.

Charles Ortleb was the first publisher and editor-in-chief to provide the world with extensive coverage of AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome at a time when most of the media was looking the other way. He is the author of
Truth to Power, the definitive history of the AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome epidemic.

“An unusual treatment of dark deeds, with compelling fiction drawing the reader, skillfully and entertainingly, into thinking about things they never thought to think about before. A Hogarthian romp into a chaotic world, that we have all heard about, but probably never needed to know—until now!”
-- Pat Gardiner, English author of the blog Animal Epidemic


Purchase the print or Kindle version of Pig: A Memoir at Amazon ($14.95) which you can find here. Right now this 138-page book is only 99 cents on Kindle. Also available on Kindle Unlimited.



The Closing Argument


This bold, uncompromising book is the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of the AIDS and chronic fatigue syndrome epidemics. It's one of those books that will inspire you to think outside of the box. Destined to be a shocking independent film, "The Closing Argument" is a provocative courtroom novella about an African-American man who is tried in Connecticut for the crime of infecting a woman with HIV, the virus that the American government has declared the official cause of AIDS. In a move that shocks the nation, his attorney puts the government and the AIDS establishment on trial and tries to convince the jury that everything the public has been told about the nature of the AIDS and CFS epidemics is both racist and homophobic. The author makes you the jury and you have to decide from the attorney's closing argument if you can believe anything you've been told about AIDS, chronic fatigue syndrome, HIV and HHV-6. This is the first work of fiction in history to focus on the cover-up of the devastating virus HHV-6 which has now been linked to many diseases in addition to AIDS and chronic fatigue syndrome. Nicholas Regush, former producer at ABC News called the book "Eye-popping reading if you dare to expand your scope of thinking about AIDS and justice."

From 1980 until 1997, Charles Ortleb was the publisher and editor-in-chief of New York Native which Wikipedia describes as "the only gay paper in New York during the early part of the AIDS epidemic" which "pioneered reporting on the AIDS epidemic when others ignored it." On May 18, 1981, New York Native published the world's very first report on the disease that would become known as AIDS. In his book, "And the Band Played On", Randy Shilts described the New York Native coverage of the epidemic as being "singularly thorough" and "voluminous." In Rolling Stone, David Black said that New York Native deserved a Pulitzer prize for its AIDS coverage. In an interview in New York Press, Nicholas Regush, a producer for ABC News and a reporter for Montreal Gazette, said that New York Native did "an astounding job" in its coverage of AIDS and credited it with "educating him early on." In a profile titled "The Outsider" in Rolling Stone in 1988, Katie Leishman wrote that "It is undeniable that many major AIDS stories were Ortleb's months and sometimes years before mainstream journalists took them up. Behind the scenes he exercises an enormous unacknowledged influence on the coverage of the medical story of the century."

In addition to pioneering the coverage of AIDS, New York Native was the only publication in the world to have a reporter, Neenyah Ostrom, who provided weekly coverage of the emergence of the epidemic of chronic fatigue syndrome and its scientific and political relationship to AIDS. Hillary Johnson, in her groundbreaking history of chronic fatigue syndrome, Osler's Web, wrote that "Ortleb, in fact, increasingly suspected the AIDS outbreak was merely a modest subset of the more pervasive, immune-damaging epidemic disease claiming heterosexuals--chronic fatigue syndrome." The breaking news about chronic fatigue syndrome and HHV-6 these days seems to suggest that much of New York Native's controversial take on the relationship between AIDS, chronic fatigue syndrome and HHV-6 is being vindicated.

Available now at Amazon in print and Kindle editions.

The Stonewall Massacre


"The Stonewall Massacre" is one of the most entertaining and provocative fictional works of alternate history ever written. This gripping 54-page story asks the politically explosive question, "What if the gay movement had been completely destroyed at its moment of birth in 1969?"

The visionary tale is told from the perspective of a gay waiter who happens to leave the famous Stonewall Inn, a gay bar located in Greenwich Village, just minutes before a police raid on a hot night in June. What happens in this imagined version of the Stonewall riots is a terrifying nightmare of violence and repression which results in the gay community permanently retreating into the shadows without any hopes of ever achieving any form of civil rights.

Ortleb captures perfectly the sinister glee of the conservative forces in psychology, religion, and the media who are only too willing to collaborate in the permanent suppression of a hated and feared sexual minority.

The second part of "The Stonewall Massacre" is where things get really wild. Set in 1982, at a time when the world is completely free of out-of-the-closet homosexuals, it describes the outbreak of a strange illness which first strikes women who are feminists. The disease is first perceived to be a kind of chronic fatigue syndrome, but as doctors study the women more, they describe it as "acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)." As AIDS begins to break out in women who are not feminists and in men and children, they realize that AIDS is not just a feminist disease. All the forces in government and science are quickly marshalled to deal with what was initially thought to be a form of chronic fatigue.

Basically, Ortleb has cleverly used a brilliant fictional premise to ask the disturbing question, "Would there have been what we think of as the AIDS epidemic in America if there was no visible gay community and would the medical establishment have realized that chronic fatigue syndrome and other mysterious illnesses are actually forms of AIDS if gay people were essentially invisible?"

A story that at first fictionalizes the total destruction of the gay community evolves into a string of troubling questions about politics, science, and the ability of medical authorities to control the information about epidemics.

There has never been an alternate fictional history quite like this. Ortleb's uncanny narrative invention is fast-paced, darkly hilarious, and infused with great philosophical intelligence as well as journalistic knowledge. "The Stonewall Massacre" is more than just literary fun. This is the rare alternate history that has the potential to actually alter history.

Charles Ortleb was one of the most important journalists of the twentieth century. As the publisher and editor-in-chief of New York Native, he pioneered the coverage of the AIDS, HHV-6 and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome epidemics. Rolling Stone said Ortleb's newspaper deserved a Pulitzer Prize. His book, Truth to Power, is considered to be the definitive history of AIDS, HHV-6, and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.



Iatrogenocide
Notes for a Political Philosophy of Epidemiology and Science


Iatrogenocide is a book bound to cause a shift in our understanding of epidemiology and science.

In the tradition of Thomas Kuhn, Charles Ortleb has looked beneath the hood of science and exposed the cultural, social, and political inner workings of an intellectual endeavor that affects the lives of everyone.

His journey to his new political philosophy of epidemiology and science began in 1981 when he was the publisher and editor-in-chief of
New York Native, a newspaper with a national gay readership in New York City. His newspaper wasn’t even a year old when the first report appeared in the media about what would become known as the AIDS epidemic. He is widely credited with being the first publisher and editor-in-chief to take the epidemic seriously and to use a newspaper’s resources to dig into the story.New York Native’s coverage of the epidemic was so thorough that, in Rolling Stone, David Black said it deserved a Pulitzer Prize. As the epidemic unfolded, Ortleb oversaw the work of a number of talented journalists and writers who helped turn New York Native into the paper of record (and conscience) for the AIDS epidemic as well as its intertwined epidemic of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome which was concealed by all kinds of political legerdemain.

The thoughts in this volume were culled from notebooks in which he began to work out his ideas for a political philosophy of epidemiology and science. He has concluded that what we think of as the epidemiology and science of AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are essentially a corrupted hard drive. Because of sexual and racial bigotry, virtually all of the science and conducted on that hard drive is false even though it has the appearance of being rational, progressive, and normal. A bold new kind of political philosophy of epidemiology and science has helped him understand how that hard drive got corrupted in the first place. The thoughts in this book will help show a way forward for anyone who wants to fix that hard drive.

During his experience of watching the AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome disaster unfold, Ortleb realized that only a new political philosophy of epidemiology and science could awaken people to what has really happened. A biomedical crime against humanity was being committed, but even serious intellectuals like Susan Sontag and many others could not perceive what was occurring before their very eyes. They could only see the surface of what was happening because they did not fully understand the intense political nature of epidemiology and science. They trusted and they did not verify what the scientific establishment was telling them. Public health is now in a state of peril because the best and the brightest were asleep at the switch.

In addition to Thomas Kuhn, Ortleb's thinking has been heavily influenced by the work of Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Isaiah Berlin, Sartre, and Camus. Like these thinkers and writers, his work is both analytical and creative. His background as a poet, journalist, humorist, and fiction writer has helped him craft one of the liveliest books of philosophical thoughts of our time.


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