read_all_nite 's review for:

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts

5.0

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I was in San Francisco the summer that the orange "GRID" posters went up in the Castro. I was working in suburban Chicago hospitals when "respectable" families started finding their loved ones dying "shameful" deaths. In microcosm, I saw what the book describes in macrocosm. Mistrust, denial, bigotry, egotism, and deceit played against a backdrop of human pain, misery and mortality. Thankfully, the AIDS crisis, while still very real, is not what it once was. That doesn't date the messages of this book, though. It's about AIDS, but it's about so much more than AIDS.