And the Band Played On

I was born in 1981. That year some of the earliest cases of what would come to be known as AIDS were diagnosed, although the disease had been present in the United States since the late 1970s. I can remember the fear of AIDS that floated around while I was in elementary school. There were stories about whether or not you could get AIDS from sharing a drinking fountain. I remember the news breaking about Ryan White, a hemophiliac who contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion. Reading Randy Shilts’s monumental work, And the Band Played On, brings so much back to life. Looking back over forty years later, this book not only recalls the fear and confusion and anger of the early years of the AIDS epidemic, it also brings back the years when it seemed like the progress of the LGBTQ+ rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s would be lost. Shilts also revivifies (at least on the pages of the book) some of the lives that were lost to disease and homophobia and bureaucratic inertia. This book is absolutely incredible...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

The AIDS crisis, told while it unfolded in the US, with a focus on SF and NY. The book is many things:

It gives the history of how researchers tried to identify the virus causing AIDS, which was at least partially news to me. I knew about the rivalry between Gallo at the National Cancer Institute in the US and the team around Françoise Barré-Sinoussi in Paris. But not to what extend it was carried out.

The book also is a shocking indictment of the inaction of public health officials and basically everyone involved in the crisis. It makes you wonder how our world would look like if there had been less bigotry and a quicker response.

Last, but by no means least, the book tells the story of the many people involved in the crisis back when. It's so depressing, you can feel the frustration of people trying to get the public health system to finally act, all while they and the ones they love are painfully dying around them.

A deeply moving read, recommended for: basically everyone, as it's a universal topic, but especially if you're into biomed, public health and/or gay culture and the respective histories.

I didn't finish this. Reads like bad journalism. The story is, of course, tragic, but the various accounts ring false like the stories that actors tell. For example, we find: "On a hunch, Gottlieb twisted some arms to convince pathologists to take a small scraping of the patient's lung tissue through a nonsurgical maneuver." OK, so the author isn't a doctor, but 1. pathologists don't do endobronchial biopsies, pulmonologists do, 2.nobody has to twist a pulmonologists arm to do an endobronchial biopsy or for a pathologist to interpret one, 3.I was around when AIDS showed up and we were fascinated by it and were eager to get that material, 4.Since this little sentence has things in it that I know are false, what is the author saying with it - is he building a case? Many other stories ring false and have doubtless been spun somehow, after all this book has a message and the author is the man with a hammer. I am reminded of the oft noticed phenomenon that when you have personal knowledge of a newspaper story, you are startled by its errors (for example, if you were the one interviewed), and then realize that the stories that you know nothing about are probably similarly inaccurate. The story of AIDS deserves better than this.