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    And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition
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    And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition
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    And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition
    Ebook1,116 pages16 hours

    And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition

    By Randy Shilts

    4.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Upon its first publication more than twenty years ago, And the Band Played on was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of investigative reporting.

    An international bestseller, a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and made into a critically acclaimed movie, Shilts' expose revealed why AIDS was allowed to spread unchecked during the early 80's while the most trusted institutions ignored or denied the threat. One of the few true modern classics, it changed and framed how AIDS was discussed in the following years. Now republished in a special 20th Anniversary edition, And the Band Played On remains one of the essential books of our time.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateNov 27, 2007
    ISBN9781429930390
    Unavailable
    And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition
    Author

    Randy Shilts

    Randy Shilts was born in 1951, in Davenport, Iowa. One of the first openly gay journalists hired at a major newspaper, he worked for the San Francisco Chronicle for thirteen years. He died of AIDS in 1994 at his home in the Sonoma County redwoods in California. He was the author of The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1982), And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic (1987), and Conduct Unbecoming: Lesbians and Gays in the U.S. Military (1993). He also wrote extensively for many major newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Newsweek, Esquire, The Los Angeles Times, and The Advocate. And the Band Played On was made into a docudrama that was broadcast on HBO in 1993.

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    Reviews for And the Band Played On

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    • 3/5
      to call this a comprehensive history would be a gross understatement. Exacting reporting of detail upon detail. It is important to document history, but this is not an easy book to read. In fact in the 100 New Classics list, this book does not have a peer.
    • 4/5
      Randy Shilts' 1987 book is the definitive, thread to the needle eye account of the discovery, denial and destruction of the AIDS epidemic which devastated thousands of lives in the 1980s. Even today, when most people understand how HIV is transmitted and with antiretroviral treatment available to slow the onset of AIDS, the disease is still a newsworthy issue, with the NHS refusing to fund PrEP treatment in the UK. Charting the first cases of AIDS - or GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency), which was the original call-it-as-you-see-it acronym for the disease - in 1980, up until the release of the book in 1987, Shilts tells a modern medical horror story of ignorance, denial, underfunding, prejudice and the almost willful manslaughter of thousands of gay men in America, primarily, but eventually worldwide. First there was the slur of 'gay cancer', and the assumption that only homosexual men were vulnerable to the strange and seemingly unconnected symptoms of Kaposi's sarcoma, cytomegalovirus (CMV) and pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) - so there was no urgent need to look for a cause or a cure. The government withheld funding for research, so that doctors like Marcus Conant, Jim Curran and Michael Gottlieb were left struggling to put the pieces of the viral jigsaw together. Neither did the gay community help matters, fighting the closure of bathhouses in San Francisco and New York - the greatest danger to gay men - and refusing to heed advice on safe sex because they valued so-called 'civil rights' over staying alive. Men like airline steward Gaetan Dugas - Patient Zero, or the 'Typhoid Mary' of AIDS - knowingly infected others with the disease, through denial or anger at being struck down themselves. Punctuated by statistical updates from the aptly termed Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report - 50 cases, 100 cases, 1000, 2000, with growing numbers of casualties every year - the chapters in Stilts' book cover the medical and political aspects of AIDS, from petty scientists refusing to work together and seeking recognition over results to 'AIDSpeak' (don't offend or embarrass anyone) and the Reagan administration turning a blind eye to the epidemic sweeping America for five years. 'It was about sex and it was about homosexuals,' Stilts quotes Mark Gottlieb.' Taken together, it had simply embarrassed people - the politicians, the reporters, the scientists'. Nobody wanted to talk openly about the sexual transmission of the disease, and when other methods of infection were revealed - blood transfusions, treatment for hemophilia, intravenous drug users, mothers passing the virus on to their unborn babies - 'respectable' society was having none of the truth. The sheer selfish greed of the blood banking industry, who wouldn't test donors for signs of AIDS for fear that they would lose money, staggered me - and this is thirty-plus years on!There is a human element to story, too, of course. Long before Rock Hudson made AIDS famous, men like Gary Walsh and Bobbi Campbell, the self-styled 'KS poster boy', and Frances Borchelt, a grandmother infected by a blood transfusion - were dying long, painful and miserable deaths while the government withheld money for tests and treatment.Even now, everybody should read Randy Shilts' book because AIDS is still a fact of life, and the struggle that doctors, scientists and epidemiologists went through to isolate the virus and find a combination of drugs which halts the AIDS death sentence shouldn't be forgotten.
    • 5/5
      This was one of many re-reads for me. I still marvel at the incredible reportage of this tour-de-force.
    • 5/5
      Loved this book! The AIDS virus is examined from the first hints of existence of an epidemic in 1980 through the final acceptance of its reality by the government and the press in 1987. The story is set forth through the eyes of the gay community and those who first become ill, gay community leaders who prefer to deal with the politics rather than the health issues, the doctors and scientists who treat and research the disease, the press which expresses little interest while it remains a homosexual matter, and the politicians who want nothing to do with the "hot potato" issue of a sexually transmitted disease ravaging primarily the gay community. The glaring unconcern of a nation in light of the alarms expressed by health professionals is frightening and makes one fear the results of the next health crisis to confront our nation and the world. Almost from the beginning the experts could chart the magnitude of the problem, but no one listened. Ultimately, it took the death of a movie star (Rock Hudson) to shine a light on the disaster that AIDS would prove to the world.
    • 5/5
      In the early 1980s, a new disease quickly began appearing in San Francisco and New York. The purple blotches of Kaposi's sarcoma and mysterious bouts of pneumocystis carinii seemed to only affect a very small minority of the public -- the gay community. But unlike other mysterious outbreaks, such as with Legionnaires' disease, the government and media response to the new disease was almost non-existent. Randy Shilts' "And the Band Played On" chronicles the early days of the AIDS epidemic, how many groups (the Regan administration, the media, the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, gay activists and organizations) responded to the situation. Infighting, political red tape, and silence -- most surprisingly from within both the medical and gay communities -- affected and undermined the research into discovering the disease. It made me angry reading this book, learning how lax the media was in paying any attention to the outbreak, reading how egos within the CDC and NIH (not to mention the lack of immediacy from the government) hampered efforts to locate the cause for the rash of odd diseases. The reaction of most in the gay community was in most cases, to ignore it. I could understand the anger in Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart", as he's one of the main players in the book.The book is very sobering and sad and alternately uplifting, realizing that not everyone was apathetic. Many of the doctors and researchers involved risked their livelihoods and reputations, seeing AIDS not as a gay disease but as a human disease. Many gay groups appeared to help get the word out about AIDS, holding candlelight vigils for loved ones, refusing to remain silent in the face of opposition."And the Band Played On" provides an in-depth and thorough look at the first years of the AIDS epidemic, and it's one of the best books I've read in quite some time. I most definitely recommend it.
    • 5/5
      This is nothing less than a compulsively readable tour-de-force in modern medical journalism. It's the history of a disease, a people, and an era all in one.I always knew I'd read this book eventually, but as with any long non-fiction tome there comes a risk that at some point your attention span might have to bow out. Not here: this book holds your interest on nearly every page (I skipped one or two of the more dense courtroom testimony pages, but often later went back to read them anyway). Randy Shilts does not ask for your time lightly - every chapter here is earned. It seems almost an omniscient narrative voice in involved, and with over 900 interviews and his own previous years of investigative work on AIDS, there's a reason for that. Before reading, I had foolishly assumed the word politics had been added to the title to sex it up a bit. Nope. The story of the various responses people, communities, and entire governments had to AIDS was all about politics. So often reading this book did I get the impression you could actually hear the bullet whiz past your ear. If you were born around or before 1980 in a first world country and ever had a blood transplant, this could have been your story too. While Mr. Shilts avoids sensationalism, the story is sensational enough in its barest facts for that point to be clear. I immediately looked up the author to learn more about what he had written only to discover he too died from AIDS in the 1990's. His book, already a tribute to a lost generation, is now an example of all the substantive contributions those men and women could've made if politics could have been shoved aside sooner. This book is a rare thing: it is both a great, historic work and a damn good read. Would that Randy Shilts had lived long enough to give us many more of its calibre.
    • 5/5
      Devastating and infuriating. All I did while reading this was shake my head in disbelief, anger or sadness. So many unnecessary deaths, so much blame to spread around. I lived this era as a fledgling physician, hearing about a "new disease", then hearing about AIDS on the West Coast, then treating babies and hemophiliacs during my training in a pediatric hospital. I (unforgivably) did not know enough about this shameful backstory in which a nation, its leaders, and its public (including some of the gay community itself) turned its back on their own.
    • 5/5
      “Those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.”“The primary problems we now face are not scientific problems but social problems involving science.”Such statements certainly provide an impetus to read this classic about the early history of AIDS in America. Though this book is over thirty years old, its meticulous research still communicates how human nature often denies diseased persons respect, compassion, and the resources necessary to recover. Such was certainly true in the 1980s with HIV/AIDS when the ball was dropped by almost everyone – politicians, doctors, scientists, activists, those with a disease, those afraid of a disease, the gay community, and the business community, to list a few.Reading this in an era of a new global pandemic (COVID), I am struck by the emotions that AIDS evoked during the 1980s and how those same emotions are reflected in encounters with a new disease. Denial, bargaining, pride, and greed are all common, human responses when encountering deadly threats. In this book, Shilts brings to life how those factors played into the advent of AIDS. He educates readers not just about HIV but about social responses to adversity.This book does not delve into pure science much. Indeed, if anything, it’s a little light on biology. However, what it lacks in hard science, it makes up for in human concern and focuses on four leading cities: San Francisco, New York City, Washington, and Paris. It treats impacted individuals with a depth of empathic understanding and detailed reporting that sucks the reader in. Intrigue is built section by section, chapter by chapter, part by part, through presenting the right facts in the right order.Few heroes dwell in this book; in fact, most heroes end up dying. Instead, this story becomes a malady of errors where human weaknesses continually jeopardize ultimate success. Forty years later, AIDS remains with us. Successful treatments exist, but they are not cures. Vaccine trials, in which I am involved as a community advisor, have repeatedly failed. Homosexuals are less socially stigmatized in America, thanks to prolonged efforts of activists. Indeed, homophobia, the norm in this book, has become more stigmatized. Reagan’s legacy has positively become bound up with the defeat of totalitarian communism, but this book reminds us that his legacy also negatively reflected a coldness when presented with his people’s suffering.This book deserves a serious read by just about everyone due to the accuracy of its depiction of human nature. As COVID reminds us, pandemics can still occur, and humans can still struggle to squarely face their realities. This book gripped me so much that while reading, I allocated most of my spare energy and all of my spare time towards digging deeper into the subject. If more people read this book decades after the emergence of AIDS, perhaps America and the world can deal with the next pandemic better. (But don’t count on it!) The obvious, most recent options to study about pandemics are the Spanish flu and AIDS. Having studied both, I definitely think this book deserves its place on a short reading list about modern epidemics and the sociology of disease.
    • 5/5
      The amount of work that went into this was amazing. With the downfall of the print media it would be hard to imagine something like this being put out today. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      This book (published in 1987) is a damning recounting of how a series of bad decisions -- some malicious, some just tragic bad judgement -- let the AIDS epidemic get out of control in the first half of the 1980s. Spoiler alert: a large portion of the blame rests with the Reagan administration and its obsession with cost-cutting. But there were other problems too, like lab directors more concerned with personal prestige than finding the cause and treatments for AIDS, or mistrust between local officials and the gay community over the intentions of public health campaigns, or miscalculations about what information to release to avoid panic or anti-gay backlash.I learned a lot from this book about what the early days of the AIDS epidemic were like, and some measure of the horror of watching the crisis unfold as people stood by and opportunities were missed to keep it from getting worse. About a few of the heroes, too, who did what they could to help even though there was little hope to be had.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A scathing expose on the inaction of the establishment (medical and governmental) as hundreds then thousands died in the early to mid-1980s. Shilts' book explores of the social and political forces at work during the early years of the AIDS pandemic.
    • 4/5
      I am furious with the way the Reagan administration FAILED to handle a public health crisis. I hope we, as a nation, have learned our lesson about ignoring problems simply because we have the belief that it only effects "others". AIDS is a human issue.
    • 5/5
      This book brought back the early 80s in hallucinatory detail. I remember when we first heard about Gay Cancer, and how hard it was to get any decent information. I remember when the world got wobbly and my friends were dying and it seemed like nobody cared. I was quite certain that, given my penchant for fey boys, I wouldn't be around to see the turn of the century. I vividly remember making up file folders for 1989 for my job and thinking that the ones for 1990 would be in someone else's handwriting. It was a scary time that was made electric for me by Shilts and Larry Kramer. I bought this book the week it came out, and it changed my view of everything. Absolutely everything.

      Reading it again some 20-odd years later brought back the anger and the sadness and that helpless, blistering rage. This is the book that made me understand viscerally that me and mine mattered nothing to the government. It's also where I learned that the best intentions can get snarled in the weeds- that people passionately devoted to an idea will serve that idea beyond all reason, that profit comes before people, and that it always takes a movie star to catch the public's imagination.

      All the mistakes, all the missteps are herein laid out in letters of fire. The Cassandras, dismissed, reviled and hushed at the time, are sadly proven right. Reagan is illuminated in the harsh light of retrospect and found wanting.

      A whole generation vanished because the health officials didn't want to talk about anal sex, the blood banks didn't want to admit they should have tested the blood, the gay rights organizations couldn't conceive of closing the baths, the government couldn't fund the scientists, the scientists couldn't let go of their need to be the first, the medical journals couldn't suspend business-as-usual, the FDA couldn't understand that double blind studies were inappropriate in the face of an epidemic of this magnitude, and on and on and on. A monumental comedy of errors that could so easily have been prevented.

      This book should be required reading for anyone entering any sort of health care profession or who might be a health care consumer some day. Infuriating, well-written, and tragically still timely. It could happen again.

      This book changed my life. I wish it hadn't had to.
    • 5/5
      Interesting that I finished this book just before Halloween. One of its most powerful aspects is the name and stories of the men who died from AIDS in its earliest days, names that would otherwise be lost to history. Granted, the first few deaths from blood transfusions are also mentioned, but that is part of the power that Shilts imports to his writing: so many in the US news media, government, and health care ignored the AIDS crisis because it was a gay disease" and it involved "embarrassing details about sex" that thousands of preventable deaths happened.

      Having been in college when the announcement of the discovery of the AIDS virus came across, I was amazed at the incredible amount of in-fighting that took place before its discovery. Shameful.

      And then there was AIDS-speak. What hypocrisy. Word on the street, even in the early 80's, was the AIDS was sexually transmitted. But to decide for others that "they shouldn't be panicked" or that the bathhouses were part of gay liberation instead of death houses? What terrible, terrible things, and what a waste of time and resources. Not to mention the blood transfusion denials. I learned later that Isaac Asimov died from a blood transfusion as much as from his liver giving out. Think of what this one man could have written.

      This book has been out for almost 30 years, and it has taken me almost 30 years to read it. It's hard to put down, heavy as it is, but the range of emotions it evokes is intense. And they're not the happy emotions, either."
    • 5/5


      "AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals."

      -Jerry Falwell

      "In this respect our townfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away, and from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away ..."

      -Albert Camus, The Plague

      Perhaps the most astonishing factor in this book, more so than the wasting disease of AIDS, is the totally pervasive sense of callous indifference. How the gay men of San Francisco didn't want to close the bathhouses. How the blood banks didn't want to institute tests because of expenses. How the senators wanted to leave the issue out of mind. How the press refused to cover the issue until it spread from the homosexual male community. How divided and underfunded the research teams were. And the Reagan administration gleefully cut funding to the CDC and NIH and only began to care when one of Reagan's favorite movie actors died.

      And now, some thirty years later, when the cure is at our fingertips, few still remember, after the benefit concerts, that some thirty million are dead, and this is by all standards, a pandemic.



      This book makes you grind your teeth with rage. How could so many people have done nothing or lied about it for so long?

      Perhaps now the only criticism (although few could have foreseen it at time of publication) is the focus on Gaeten Dugas, or 'Patient Zero'. He may not have been the singular cause for the spread of the disease, but one of the first group. But he still typifies the wanton ignorance and total psychopathy which involves spreading an unknown disease to hundreds of people, often telling his partners after the act, "I have gay cancer. You'll have it too." Murderous. What just god would send plagues, sinners or otherwise?

      This is really good. I can't take it any more.
    • 3/5
      I really struggled with how to rate this book. There's no doubt it's full of a great deal of information and the steps taken to try and 'humanise' the book and tell the stories of some of the people affected are laudable. However, it also makes it difficult to decide whether to read this as a factual work or an anecdotal one and at times it's possible to forget you're reading a work of non-fiction and feel like you've slipped into a novel ("Mr X looked out of his window at the sparkling ocean that lay beyond..." doesn't really fit well into a factual work).The topic will always be a difficult one and the steps taken to address it in a full and fair way are admirable but for me this book was too woolly in it's approach to the telling of the facts to fully appreciate it.
    • 5/5
      It took me more than 5 weeks to read this book and during that time I felt as though I lived daily with the author and the people he portrayed. The book is written in a journalistic style punctuated with beautiful prose and a sense of indignation that grows stronger and stronger as the storyline progresses. Randy Shilts did a superb job of placing personal stories in the context of civil rights, politics, and American biases regarding discussions of sex and sexual orientation. Truly, this is a story about how we damage each other in society. Very few groups come out looking good. Of course, the Reagan administration, which didn't want to spend money on a "gay disease" even after it was budgeted by Congress, the gay rights advocates, whose fears of civil rights violations kept them from advocating safe sex policies that could have saved thousands of lives, the NIH, which was locked in a fight with the Pasteur Institute for credit for the discovery of the AIDS virus, the list goes on and on. Only at the CDC did I find a few officials who saw the coming epidemic and tried very hard to make the decisions necessary to save lives. Otherwise, the heroes of this book are a few people, physicians, doctors, private citizens who worked very hard to avoid this catastrophe. I think every college student should be made to read this book in a lesson on civic responsibility. It is an amazing book, rendered even more poignant by the early death of its talented author.
    • 3/5
      Very interesting and important book, but confusing narrative and focus. This book would have benefited from from some editing, and maybe should even have been multiple books. The focus is mainly on the government's response to the emerging threat of AIDS and on the gay community's response, with a further focus on San Francisco. Enough for two books, with a third on the general epidemic, since AIDS internationally and in other risk groups and locations than the gay communities of San Francisco and New York is mostly ignored.
    • 5/5
      I remmeber reading once that this book was a history of a disease, but it's really far more than that. There's a Stalin quote that goes something like "The death of one person is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic."Which is one of the reasons why this story is so powerful. It's the story of AIDS, but it's more the story of PWAs, and the people populating their lives. An epidemic told from the perspectives of individuals destroyed by it. It's an incredibly powerful technique, and this book affected almost every aspect of the way I perceive politics, faith, passion, and dispaasion.
    • 4/5
      This is a great work on investigative journalism.I read this in the late 80's and just re-read it. I won't repeat the praise from the other reviewers. What struck me was how so many people, organizations, groups, political groups, etc, missed an opportunity to slow this disease down a bit. It is awfully hard to turn the direction of society. You can only hope that the lessons of this epidemic laid the groundwork for better reactions to future epidemics.
    • 5/5
      As I read this book, I couldn't help asking myself, over and over, how people could possibly have let it all happen like that. How could the bathhouses stay open so long? Why was almost no one willing to use a condoms or curtail their activities? Why were federal and local governments so unwilling to do anything? From this late vantage point, it is easy to wonder that. Having seen AIDS, if there was to be another disease like it in sneakiness and severity, we'd likely catch on quicker, because we'd be able to say, oh, this is like AIDS, better not fuck it up this time. I was born while the events on page 435 were happening, more than two thirds of the way through the book, and grew up in a world where AIDS was a reality, where blood drives have requirements, and where condom use is taught in school. Queer people are freer than they've ever been and getting freer every day. Jonathan Larson has long since written that song asking us how we measure a year. In the early 1980s, none of this was true. Medicine had recently conquered small pox, most STIs were treatable with a quick dose of antibiotics, nothing like AIDS had ever been see before, and even the Ebola virus had been quickly and efficiently dealt with; that the medical establishment would clear up a new disease quickly was a given. Queer people were liberating themselves but still rightfully wary of oppression and hate, wary of any attempt to curtail civil liberties or have their lives looked upon in askance. Frank public discussion of sex was a non-starter, condoms were uncouth, and Reagan was president. Let's talk about the Reagan administration for a second. If any one person could have changed the course of all this, it was Reagan. If he had been at all interesting in spending money on anything besides mucking around in the Middle East and Latin America, AIDS would have been less of a fiasco than it was. That it took so long to figure out what was going on was directly the fault of the administration's unwillingness to fund research at the CDC and other agencies, in the name of fiscal responsibility. The man got through a term and a half without ever publicly addressing the issue! It is true that many other people made many other mistakes, but the buck stopped at the top.So, why did the AIDS crisis end up so badly? Because no one wanted to believe it could be so bad, and Republicans hate you. I thought of myself well versed is recent social/political history such as this, but, oh man, was this book as eye-opener. I'd only ever heard good things about ACT UP and Gay Men's Health Crisis, how they were so important and vigilant in helping the get the response to AIDS rolling. Being from down-state New York myself, I'd never heard just how abysmal the response was of New York City and New York State in the first half of the '80s. I'd never heard how San Francisco was so far ahead of the game, and how that city had the first AIDS hospital ward, and at one point was spending more on AIDS than the federal government. I have new-found appreciation for some members of the government -- Henry Waxman, Dianne Feinstein, among others -- for their roles in it all. I couldn't stop reading this book. Even though it is over 600 pages and I read it during my last two weeks of grad school. It is engaging and heart-wrenching and mind-blowing. There was a commercial on TV 10 to 15 years ago, where an actor went through some Suburbia, USA, and asked what it would be like if such and such high percentage of people had died, with so many orphans, and empty houses and what not. And then the actor told us that that's what it's like in some locales in Africa, where whole families are dying of AIDS daily. As the people in this book died off, I thought that's what it must have been like in the certain neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco. Gay men would watch everyone they knew die horribly -- AIDS is not a pretty death -- and then wonder when their turn would come. Could you imagine that among your own circle? I could, especially because, like some of the gay men depicted in this book, we've been in and out of each others' beds (though now with rampant condom use and HIV/STI tests that are taken regularly, things are obviously much safer) over the last few years. But what if? I can hardly imagine it, except that I can and the thought is horrifying. And here we have an account of the people who lived through (or not) such a reality. May it serve as a warning to us all, and a memorial to them.
    • 5/5
      wonderful depiction of what went on when the aids epidemic first started...the denial, the politics to keep the bath houses open, the fear, the hatred against the gay community. Randy Shilts did a fine job of putting it all together.
    • 4/5
      Remarkably more even-handed than I would have expected -- some individual heroes but a lot more than surrendered to politics than empathy--from all political sides. Particularly interesting given the controversy over the Nobel Prize award to the French for finding the HIV virus--according to this book, they got it right. History at its best for those of us who believe that you must study history in order not to repeat the errors.
    • 5/5
      The ultimate story about the early days of the AIDS epidemic. It covers all the issues with government bureaucracy, medical research, politics, and general homophobia in those early days when AIDS was considered the "gay cancer" Shilts has given the story a very human face. now , after all these years, it's still hard to stomach all the mishandling of the AIDS epidemic
    • 5/5
      A powerful - and important - story detailing the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Shilts has taken what could be a lot of dry reading about governmental bureaucracy, medical research, and political agendas and and policies and created an amazingly *human* story. He covers some of the very few cases of AIDS that go back as far as the late-50's and documents - with a reminder of the increasing death toll as the years go by - our government's indifference and the efforts of the gay community and others to try to get our leaders to even acknowledge that it existed. Shilt's book is a remarkable tribute to the people who tried to address the disease before it became an epidemic and a stark reminder that even in a country where we're all supposedly "created equal" some aren't as equal as the rest.
    • 4/5
      The Godfather of all AIDS books. Written with great passion and a fair bit of insight.
    • 5/5
      100 pages into And The Band Played On: Politics People and the AIDS Epidemic, some doctors hope a bad batch of poppers is causing the 'gay cancer'. A few other doctors are doing the legwork of interviewing patients in an attempt to piece together better theories. Shilts details fierce struggles between the CDC and the patronizing NCI and New England Journal of Medicine which turn deaf ears to CDC doctors' pleas for resources and speed. He brings the story to life through the voices of people involved in the crisis ~ Larry Kramer, Paul Popham, Gaëtan Dugas, and Grethe Rask stand out so far. As i read, i find myself seething at the willful blindness, homophobia, egos, and ideologies of those who hindered the work. For example, in the last few pages, a doctor noticed similar symptoms in the baby of a drug-addicted mother and noted it on the baby's chart. His notes were struck out by higher ups who insisted it was 'just a gay disease' that had nothing to do with the child. Aargh! By the end of the book, the greed, venality, timidity, fear, apathy, hatred, self-interest, and lust for power that created one unconscionable act after another and led to unfathomable suffering and death has been detailed. But what also stood out was the courage and spirit of AIDS victims such as the young psychotherapist, Gary Walsh. i wish every America would read this book.
    • 5/5
      The best and most easily read review of the beginning of the HIV epidemic.
    • 5/5
      And The Band Played On is what all good non-fiction sets out to be - detailed, interesting and deeply illuminating.My simplistic understanding was that AIDS got its toe-hold on the world because Reagan and his cronies were only too happy to let gays and IV drug users die. In this landmark book about the early days of the epidemic, Randy Shilts lays out a much more complex picture of the truth. Also among the groups complicit in the unfolding tragedy were the scientists who placed their overweening egos before the needs of the sick, and the gay leaders who were more interested in preserving gay men's rights to anonymous bathhouse sex than educating them about the mortal dangers they faced. A masterpiece of investigative journalism.
    • 5/5
      Riveting explanation of the origins of the AIDS epidemic - documents the medical, social, and political back stories of the times - the definitive story of how a blind eye was turned time and time by the politicians, medical community and society itself and how committed individuals refused to give in - this book provides a critical history to the current AIDS epidemic still going on today.