And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition |
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You Are Here: Home > History Books > Gerald Ford > Item 239
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And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition
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by Randy Shilts
Sales Rank: 30672
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List Price: $16.95
$11.53
At Amazon
on 10-15-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 656 pages
Published by: St. Martin's GriffinEdition: Revised Edition November 27, 2007
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0312374631
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0312374631
Book Dimensions:
8.1 x 5.5 x 1.9 inches
Weighs: 1.3 pounds
Product Review
In the first major book on AIDS, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Randy Shilts looks at the making of an epidemic. Shilts researched and reported the book exhaustively, chronicling almost day-by-day the first five years of AIDS. His work is critical of the medical and scientific communities' initial response and particularly harsh on the Reagan Administration, who he claims cut funding, ignored calls for action and deliberately misled Congress. Shilts doesn't stop there, wondering why more people in the gay community, the mass media and the country at large didn't stand up in anger more quickly. The AIDS pandemic is one of the most striking developments of the late 20th century and this is the definitive story of its beginnings.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
"An exhaustive account of the early years of the AIDS crisis, this outlines the medical, social and political forces behind the epidemic's origin and rapid spread," reported PW . "The book stands as a definitive reminder of the shameful injustice inflicted on this nation by the institutions in which we put our trust . . . a landmark work." 200,000 first printing; author tour.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reader Reviews
This review is from: And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (Paperback)
Randy Shilts masterpiece, "And The Band Played On", reads like a detective story; from the discovery of an unusual new organism that was killing a few people slowly and inexorably in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and multiplied exponentially underground until it exploded into the number one health catastrophe on the planet. The fact that AIDS at first took its heaviest toll among gay men, and then among intravenous drug users, guaranteed that its early victims would become outcasts. The AIDS panic seems unbelievable in retrospect but was all too real in the 80s; people were forced off their jobs, children were barred from schools, and anyone who belonged to the "4-H club" (homosexuals, hard-drug users, hemophiliacs, and -- incredibly -- Haitians)were treated like pariahs. The secrecy and denial in dealing with the crisis helped it to spread unabated. Shilts pulls no punches in writing this book. He is equally angry at the Reagan administration which preached pious platitudes while withholding desperately needed funds for medical research; the radical gay community which refused to acknowledge its own responsibility for the sexually promiscuous behavior that helped spread the disease like wildfire, and those in the medical community who played grandstanding politics and plain old-fashioned spite while patients were dying all around them. And then of course there was the media, which treated this puzzling, terrifying new disease, which for two years after its discovery didn't even have a name, as something the "general public" didn't have to be concerned about -- until heterosexual men and women began to be infected. But there were also the heroes -- the physicians who devoted their days and nights to treating their patients, gay men like Larry Kramer who refused to let the gay community sweep the problem under the rug, Rock Hudson, whose up-front candor and admission of his illness shocked the American public and helped to bring AIDS out of the closet once and for all, and C. Everett Koop, Reagan's Surgeon General, who refused to play politics and demonstrated the leadership his boss lacked in his common-sense and compassionate approach to meeting the crisis, to the horror of his right-wing constituency. Shilts wrote his story with such compelling urgency that it wraps the reader up like a whodunit you don't want to put down. One shares his disgust at the doctors who cared more about their own self-promotion than about their patients; the right-wing politicians who treated the victims of a devastating and deadly disease as if they were sinners who had earned the wrath of God; the gay men who didn't care how many people they infected as long as they could enjoy the promiscuous atmosphere of the bath houses, and most incredibly, the for-profit blood banks, which refused to admit their product was carrying a deadly virus and fought against blood testing for three years while the number of people who died from transfusions of infected blood grew by the thousands. And in a heartbreaking coda to this story, Shilts deliberately put off having his own blood tested while he was writing this book because he didn't want his judgement biased if he turned out to be HIV positive. It was only after he finished the book that he learned that he was infected with the virus that had killed so many and in a few years would also kill him. Shilts' death from AIDS was a tragedy, but he left us this magnificent book as his legacy. After reading his book, we are the richer and the wiser for his information, his insight and his understanding.
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And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition
Available from Amazon
Price: $11.53
Updated on 10-15-2008.
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