And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition Books
- ISBN13: 9780312374631
- Shape up: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Upon it’s first publication twenty years ago, And The Band Played on was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of investigatve reporting. An international epic, a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and made into a critically acclaimed movie, Shilts’ expose exposed why AIDS was allowed to spread unchecked during the early 80’s even as the most trusted institutions ignored or denied the risk. One of the few right modern classics, it changed and framed how AIDS was discussed in the following years. Now republished in a unique 20th Anniversary edition, And the Band Played On remains one of the essential books of our time.
In the first major book on AIDS, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Randy Shilts examines the making of an epidemic. Shilts researched and reported the book exhaustively, chronicling nearly 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 people at large didn’t stand up in rage more quickly. The AIDS pandemic is one of the most striking developments of the late 20th century and this is the definitive tale of its beginnings.
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A small over five years ago, one of my friends growing up died of AIDS. He was 47. This book makes a mockery of his death. He didn’t die because of anything that any president or government did. No, not even Ronald Reagan, the fantastic enemy of the radical homosexual movement, killed him. He died a horrible death and undoubtedly so did some of his partners. He and they died because they chose to engage in a highly promiscuous homosexual lifestyle. He ignored facts that were widely known in the “gay” community well before Reagan took office.
By choosing to blame others, Shilts will to some degree continue to provide male homosexuals with a reason not to stop their behavior. It is this denial of the reality of the HIV virus and the deadly consequences of AIDS that will continue to result in the deaths of not just homosexuals, but those heterosexuals engaging in risky behaviors.
This book and it’s author’s opinions are a disgrace to all thought and caring people. It is filled with hatred and blaming of those who simply said, “It’s your choice.” Shilts perpetuates the monstrous lie that it’s really someone else’s fault. AIDS is a terrible way to die. Until scientists (the excellent guys!) can find a cure or at least an vaccination for it, the only thing that will preclude it is to act dutifully. If you don’t like that truth, then join Shilts, blame others, and keep AIDS going. Indeed the band does play on.
Rating: 1 / 5
The incredible part of this tragedy is that Shilits was a frequent visitor to the baths he condemns in this book even after knowing he was infected and thus infected countless other humans, directly or indirectly.
This book is excellent only if you view it as an example of someone blaming someone else for your own destructive behavior. Even as this book has become a major read for those who are into “victimhood” the sad truth is that Shilts is far more guilty than any of those he condemns in this book because he was the one who transmitted the virus, not the owners of the baths he paid money to in order to have his night of fun and ultimate death.
Shilts was sick in more ways than one when he wrote this and deserves condemnation rather than praise. Excellent night, killer.
Rating: 1 / 5
This is an engrossing narrative, which unfortunately is absolutely hurt by the author’s shrill political carping. Before you read this book, you should know that Mr. Shilts was an extreme left wing homosexual activist who was infected with AIDS and had a corresponding political agenda to promote. This doesn’t make him a terrible person or a terrible author – but it does call the detachment of his book into question. Reading this book for entertainment value is one thing, but relying on it for factual history of the AIDS epidemic is like trusting Dick Cheney to write an objective history of the Bush administration.
Rating: 2 / 5
Aids epidemic is problem, so need to soving
Rating: 4 / 5
The sexual revolution is over, wrote an ancient revolutionist named P.J. O’Rourke, and the microbes won. This book, by an SF journalist now dead from AIDS, tells how the microbes won the war.
Author Randy Shilts tells the tale of all-night all-day playgrounds on America’s left coast and of the way those bath houses and bent brothels became incubators for retroviruses. AIDS wasn’t the gay plague, Shilts reports. It was the 4th or 5th gay plague, nurtured by a radicalized and sexualized subculture that had blown out of Stonewall’s closet. Gay sexual activists took it for contracted, writes Shilts, that an indulgent and helpful society would everlastingly find a key bullet for their promiscuously transmitted diseases. When the key bullet for a weird plague of the early 1980s didn’t magically appear, sexual athletes did what any normal hot-blooded Americans would do: they blamed Reagan.
Mr. Shilts in his book was judicious about the blame game. His scorn for bath house behaviors & for blood banks is loud & clear; cheap-shotting of Reagan is muted. Reagan, after all, had other wars and a rocky post-Carter economy on his hands. By the time Mr. Shilts’ book became a tv mini-movie, but, Reagan went to the front and focal top as its designated baddie. If only he had uttered the name of the sickness that dared not converse in its name, thousands and millions and billions of us would have been saved … after all, we are now told, we all have AIDS. (Ponder what Reagan might have said if he’d been convinced by Koop or somebody to converse in the name of AIDS in 1982 or 1983: Well, as your mothers probably should have told you … Reagan, being a realist, understood that AIDS in America was/is overwhelmingly a behavioral disease.)
Read And the Band Played On in tandem with Dragon Within the Gates by Stephen Joseph, former health commissioner of New York City and former Clintonista. These books, together, are the best war reporting of the recent past. They show how microbes won the war, and how microbes then won civil rights.
Rating: 5 / 5