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4.49 AVERAGE
4.49 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Long, densely-sourced, exhausting, but impossible to put down. This should be required reading for anyone interested in public health or politics.
A heavy topic and big book, but worth every ounce. Every American should read this. Folks from other places (particularly those in the midst of HIV challenges and politics too) could also benefit from it.
A strange book-- exhaustively researched and detailed, yet written in the turgid, melodramatic style of an airport thriller. Possibly TOO detailed, it can frequently be tiring in its attention to the tiniest details of funding squabbles between various government, public health, and medical agencies, though a valuable resource that is uniformly crushing. No group of people comes out of this book looking as though they weren't partly responsible for the AIDS epidemic's terrible destruction. Reagan and the US government, of course; people in the CDC, the NIH, and the National Cancer Institute who sat on their hands while people died; those who ran blood banks like the Red Cross who denied the illness was transmissible while their organizations were giving it to thousands of people it would kill; activists in the gay community who believed closing the bathhouses would be the first step to putting gays in concentration camps and so defeated a measure that would likely have reduced by some portion the number of people infected; the administration of New York Mayor Ed Koch who gave only peanuts to the largest population of AIDS patients in the US. Not to mention spineless doctors like Robert Gallo more interested in their own fame for discovering AIDS than in getting information about the disease out as fast as possible, and journals like the New England Journal of Medicine (among others) that forbade doctors from making their research public during the six-month lead-up to publication, therefore delaying public knowledge of the disease in its early stages.
The book can best be summed up in this passage: "Later, everybody agreed the baths should have been closed sooner; they agreed health education should have been more direct and more timely; And everybody agreed blood banks should have tested blood sooner, and that a search for the AIDS virus should have been started sooner, and that scientists should have laid aside their petty intrigues. Everybody subsequently agreed that the news media should have offered better coverage of the epidemic much earlier, and that the federal government should have done much, much more. By the time everyone agreed to all this, however, it was too late. Instead, people died. Tens of thousands of them."
The book can best be summed up in this passage: "Later, everybody agreed the baths should have been closed sooner; they agreed health education should have been more direct and more timely; And everybody agreed blood banks should have tested blood sooner, and that a search for the AIDS virus should have been started sooner, and that scientists should have laid aside their petty intrigues. Everybody subsequently agreed that the news media should have offered better coverage of the epidemic much earlier, and that the federal government should have done much, much more. By the time everyone agreed to all this, however, it was too late. Instead, people died. Tens of thousands of them."
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Alison Bechdel refers to this book in her memoir "Fun Home," and calls it a "minute chronicle." Which totally sells it short. Shilts not only re-creates a clear, detailed, and comprehensive picture of the early days of the AIDS crisis, he gives us a story with the tension of the best thrillers and the pathos of the best Greek tragedies. A must-read for anyone who cares about, well, anything.
I held off on reading this for years because I watched the movie and have been squeamish about AIDS. I'm glad I broke down and read it because it's a remarkable piece of journalism. Even though it's over thirty years old it's not dated at all. It's especially haunting that the author himself eventually died from AIDS.
The sad thing is that history is repeating itself. Scientific and medical research has been drastically cut. Gay men have gone back to having carefree unprotected sex, encouraged by a gay corporate media that gets its money from drug companies who want to push the myth that a magic pill solves everything. STD rates are skyrocketing. It's only a matter of time before an antibiotic-resistant strain spreads like wildfire.
AIDS itself also hasn't been cured. It's a very nasty virus. Constantly evolving. There have already been cases of folks shocked to find that their preventative drugs (pRep) failed them. A lot of folks claim to be HIV 'Undetectable." But if the drugs stop working, that will quickly change, and many people will suddenly start dying.
The sad thing is that history is repeating itself. Scientific and medical research has been drastically cut. Gay men have gone back to having carefree unprotected sex, encouraged by a gay corporate media that gets its money from drug companies who want to push the myth that a magic pill solves everything. STD rates are skyrocketing. It's only a matter of time before an antibiotic-resistant strain spreads like wildfire.
AIDS itself also hasn't been cured. It's a very nasty virus. Constantly evolving. There have already been cases of folks shocked to find that their preventative drugs (pRep) failed them. A lot of folks claim to be HIV 'Undetectable." But if the drugs stop working, that will quickly change, and many people will suddenly start dying.
This is a facinating read, especially in terms of "tipping points" for social action (or inaction, as the case sadly may have been). I found it to be both infuriating and inspiring, as well as a cautionary tale for whatever form the next epidemic may take. Even though we have made huge strides in the prevention, detection, and treatment of HIV/AIDS, we still have a l-o-n-g way to go in terms of stigma, misinformation, and reaching underserved populations. Learning more about how this disease began is a good start.
