Rating: 
Summary: first the plague then the revolution...
Review: Its been almost 20 years since news of this dreadful disease first caught the worlds attention. Young gay men first in the gay capitals of San Francisco & New York and then elsewhere were falling mysteriously ill with dreadful complications from pneumonia and unsightly skin lesions. It was the start of "the gay plague" and an anti-gay hysteria that was to grip communities everywhere. These were the new lepers, but treated worse. Even by health professionals in the US top medical facilities who should have known better. It was not the nursing professions proudest moment. Fortunately 20 years later we know better mainly due to the journalistic efforts of one reporter named Randy Shilts. In his book Shilts chronicles the onset of the virus from africa to europe,the carribean and then the streets of americas largest cities. Its devastating effects on both the famous and the infamous as it cut across cultural racial and economic barriers. In this no one was immune. Shilts does not over whelm us with statistics but instead presents the human side of the disease in a dozen case studies of individuals infected with hiv from its onset to the inevitable outcome. The broadway choreographer, the socialite, the professional basketballer, the architect, the congressional aide, their stories are documented with an odd balance of passionate and clinical detail. The author captures their initial fears,hopes and acquiescence. In 20 years time when AIDS is as treatable as the common cold and other more virulent diseases plague our immune systems historians will look back at these times for a definitive chronicle on how it all began. They need look no further than the pages of this book. Perhaps my only reservation of the books findings is medical researchers reference at the time to canadian airlines steward Gaetan Dugas as "patient zero". I and many others have questioned this. If Dugas gave it to others then who gave it to him ? It is a puzzle which will no doubt intrigue medical detectives for generations to come. The truth is probably not even Dugas knew himself but he will probably go down in history as the most prolific viral infector of modern times. Randy Shilts himself had his own theories but sadly is no longer with us having succumbed some years ago to the disease he knew so much about and wanted so much to beat. The irony is that he died too soon to benefit from the array of anti-hiv drug cocktails now so effective and readily available to hiv sufferers in the US and the western world. Vaya con dios.Playright Paul Rudinek once fantasized about one day in the future coming across the last hiv molecule alone and quivering in some dark corner of a government laboratory. No mercy...
Rating: 
Summary: Shilts was there and he wrote about it as a true reporter
Review: Randy Shilts could have taken the easy way out. He could have blamed Reagan (he did not, no matter what the reviews said) he could have blamed the CDC (he did not, though he took a very good potshot at them for their beauracratic nonsense).
He could have blamed Gaiten, who is the person identified as bringing this plague to our shores.
He did none of those things in this book. He simply describes how this epidemic came to this country and spread.
He makes it clear that in San Francisco, being "Gay" evolved from simply desiring a partner of the same gender to the most perverted sexual situations one can imagine. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out who the "innocent" is that is introduced to the bathhouses.
And in true form, Mr. Shilts never refers to the "innocent" as an innocent.
He makes a solid case that the Gay leadership actually helped spead this deadly disease.
Mr. Shilts' prose accounts for the lack of sales of his book. He presents facts. They are not pretty. He knew that at the end of his life, and he presented the truth.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful insight into a political nightmare
Review: Randy Shilts has written an incredibly detailed accounting of what happened, and what failed to happen, during the 1980's. Through detailed interviews and research, he shows how the disease spread, and who the people were who fought to keep the disease controlled. More interesting than that, however, is his account of how the government's inaction contributed to the present day AIDS crisis, specifically the complete lack of executive leadership under Reagan. He also shows us how the blood banks refused to adopt procedures to reduce AIDS transmissions, and how the gay community itself contributed to the crisis by refusing to close the bathhouses in San Francisco. Every gay person should read this book, as should everyone who knows someone with HIV/AIDS. Your view of the disease and American politics in the 80's will be forever changed.
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Summary: "A horribly cruel and insidious virus"
Review: 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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Summary: Horrifying portrait of lowpoint in global history.
Review: Randy Shilts, who has since passed from this disease, wrote what has to be the most difinitive account of the genesis and proliferation of the AIDS epidemic. If it weren't for the complexity, detail, and length of the book, it should be mandatory reading for high school students in sociology: The way our government and society interacted and ultimately aided the spread of this disease is something I can only hope future generations will heed and learn from. Shilts takes us from the first known discovery of this disease to how it became an inexplicable medical annoyance to a panic-inducing malady...in short...you learn more than you need to know. What's interesting to note was that the government's refusal to act or to even acknowledge the disease seems to be one of the most obvious contributions to it's spread. The saddest part is to finish the book and think 'What would have happened if...' The book itself if fascination, but does go into great detail. It's not for the casual reader. Shilts' style jumps around to many different faces of the epidemic's early days, so you have to be prepared to jump into different stories. If you've seent he HBO movie based on this, it serves as a good visual 'cliffs notes,' for the book. I highly recommend, but add that you need to bring your concentration. You will not be disappointed.
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Summary: Helping ourselves to death
Review: Shilts writes like a dying man with nothing to lose, which is refreshing. There is so much fakery about this disease. There is so much lying about the reality of being a gay man almost anywhere in the world. HIV happens to be fit the profile required to kill highly promiscuous people. That's what's happening, and it will continue. The reviewer from New Zealand that said that someday AIDS will be like the common cold is not a virologist. For your information, the common cold is untreatable. It is innocuous, mostly, for us, only because our immune systems fight it off. A new book that is as hard hitting as Shilts' book would be good. The drug treatment programs are raising the total spread of this disease, because people in the developing world teeming in slums, or out in the bush can't afford to keep taking this stuff, and hardly care, because their lives are so miserable already. They think they are safer, or that treatment is available, and so do people in the developed world. So everyone thinks, more and more that they don't have to change their behavior. Unfortunately, shoveling the drugs that work now to some degree into the developing world is a recipe for breeding resistant strains of HIV, just like shoveling antibiotics there is a recipe for breeding resistant strains of tuberculosis. Why? Because the people can't and won't take them consistently there. Sporadic is worse than nothing at all for the long term epidemiology. All drugs slowly lose effectiveness in the battle against evolution of diseases. But this is a recipe for orders of magnitude decrease of time in which HIV control medications will work. The people can't take them consistently because of logistics in those regions, because of ignorance, because they can't afford them, and most of all because they can make so much money by selling them on the black market to the black market AIDS drug sellers. It's unpleasant, but those cut rate black market AIDS medications that make their way into San Francisco, New York and other cities were taken from distribution programs in the developing world most likely. Sit there in your comfortable house with your pleasant fantasies about how AIDS is being defeated and think about that. I guarantee you HIV isn't under control and won't be. AIDS is gathering itself for a more potent assault than ever. If you want an answer to AIDS, change your behavior and change the behavior of others. Don't count on drugs. Don't ever believe that you can take it casually.
Rating:
Summary: A Powerful, Important, Book
Review: Some books should be read to be enjoyed. Others are educational, teaching us valuble lessons in life. And the Band Played On is both of these, as well as an immensely important book. While every last word is factual, as evidenced by the afterword Shilts writes, it doesn't read like an article or news story at all. Shilts deftly weaves intricate plots together into a masterful web of a book. The story jumps from East to West coast, country to country, continent to continent, as doctors scramble to find the bacterial agent that causes AIDS. When reading it, you cannot help but feel overcome with emotion. Anger, yes. Fear, yes, and a dark pall of sadness.Part medical thriller, part AIDS drama, and a truly human story, And the Band Played On will live on for many years to come.
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Summary: A revelation - history, journalism, politics and people
Review: Stop what you are doing and read this book.
The book forced me to come to terms with a fact I've been warding off with all my might for about 20 years: HIV infection did not spread from a handful of isolated cases to 70 million afflicted world-wide because of natural forces, nor because of inevitable difficulties.
HIV did not spread because this virus was too difficult to stop. It did not reach out and strangle the gay community, innocent babies, transfusion recipients, hemophiliacs, and a good portion of Russia and Africa because it was smarter than we are, faster than we are, or despite out best efforts. It has killed and will kill millions of people because the government of the United States, and the media, in what amounted to a conspiracy of silence, decided not to care.
There was no cabal. No one sat down and plotted it. They simply let it happen. And they did so because it was just affecting Queers (and then later, drug addicts) and poor blacks, and so who really cares?
The fact is that the worst natural disaster in history wasn't natural at all. It was a direct and avoidable result of hatred of homosexuals and disdain for our deaths.
This book reads like a thriller and a horror story told by a brillian journalist. Absolutely required reading.
Rating:
Summary: A Heartbreaking Realization
Review: This book gives a very specific history to one of the most mysterious and saddest diseases of the 20th Century. What Shilts does quite well is practically trace AIDS down to one of the first people to get the disease. He shows us what the climate was like in the U.S. at the time, and how that climate actually fed into the political and rhetorical systems that kept AIDS undisclosed for so many months. We see the early encounters man had with AIDS. It is a very fascinating journey to follow Shilts on the tracking of this disease. We see its birth, we follow its journey, we witness its impact, and then we dread its future, which is actually our own. What is heartbreaking are his physical accounts of what AIDS actually does to the body. Shilts documents these episodes with painstaking accuracy and unbelievable detail. It is this haunting juxtaposition of technical research and the horrific personal stories of AIDS victims that stands out most to me. This book is an eerie foreshadowing of doom and a bleak future for ALL of us if we don't stop and take caution. In a very unbiased way, Shilts outlines the failings of our government, the failings of our scientists, and the ignorance of mankind in failing, and almost refusing, to shed the stigma of a disease that knows of no social class--you only have to be human to get it and it will love you regardless of who you are.
Rating:
Summary: Emotional whiplash
Review: This book is absolutely heart-rending. The emotions one experiences reading through this documentation of the first responses to the AIDS virus are numerous, and as different as night and day. I was by turns hopeful that a happy ending was just around the corner, and frustrated beyond belief at the behavior of some of the people involved. It is appalling how little was done to combat the disease at first, simply because of prejudice and misunderstanding.
You will smile, you will cry, you will cheer, and you will get so mad you have to put the book down... only to pick it up five seconds later, because it is that good. Shilts' style of writing is engrossing as he ties in statistics and general information with the personal accounts of the many doctors and people who dealt (and deal) with the virus on a daily basis. The people he writes about have faces and emotions, and cannot be simply pushed into a list of anonymous beings unconnected with the reader. But be ready to have all of your own emotions tugged and stretched, because reading this book without an emotional reaction is impossible.
Reading this book was one of the best things I ever did; I cannot get it out of my head, which is,of course, the whole point.
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