he Least Of These My Brethren presents a harrowing, compelling look into the daily life of a dedicated attending physician in New York City's largest designated AIDS center. Dr. Baxter recounts heart-wrenching and graphic stories with humanism, dignity, and decency.
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
In the decade and a half that AIDS has been with us, Americans' attitudes about the disease and those afflicted with it have largely been shaped by films such as An Early Frost and Longtime Companion, the plays The Normal Heart and Angels in America, and the overwhelming symbolism of the AIDS quilt. For the most part, these expressions of popular culture focus on a fraction of the AIDS population, those sufferers who are easiest for mainstream Americans to identify with. Dr. Daniel Baxter puts a new face on the AIDS crisis in The Least of These My Brethren, a chronicle of the years he spent treating patients at the Spellman Center for H.I.V.-Related Diseases at St. Clare's Hospital in downtown Manhattan.
Baxter's patients are drug addicts, prisoners, and prostitutes, people with already broken lives for whom AIDS is just one more trouble to add to the list. There is nothing noble or cinematic about these victims. As they file through the halls and wards of the Spellman Center, Baxter describes their ailments that: AIDS-related lymphoma, rectal bleeding, tuberculosis, and much, much more. Baxter notes in his preface that "We are all ultimately H.I.V. positive in this cumbersome experience called life;" in other words, death is our common fate, the experience that unites even the most disparate individuals. In this shared inevitability, even the most fortunate among us can find empathy for the least.
From Publishers Weekly
This book does for the medical view of AIDS what Paul Monette's Last Watch of the Night or the film Silverlake Life did for the personal aspect. Baxter compiled it over several months while he was staff physician at the country's first designated AIDS center, and now its largest: Catholic St. Clare's Hospital in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen. Taking as his frame the hospital's quarterly recitation of names of the ward's dead, Baxter tells the stories of patients whose lives and deaths have affected him the most profoundly. The composition of the narratives out of these shatteringly affecting recollections is expert and ennobling. That the people Baxter is describing represent the "other," rapidly growing face of AIDS-drug users, prostitutes, prisoners-makes the book's success all the more remarkable. We learn next to nothing about the author himself, except that he is an extraordinarily thoughtful and compassionate man who has grasped the effects of AIDS-on people and society-how it differs from other diseases and how it is the same. That Baxter escapes being either maudlin or saccharine with material so consistently close to the bone is a triumph of thought over reflex.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Story You'll Never Forget,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Least of These My Brethren: A Doctor's Story of Hope and Miracles on an Inner-City AIDS Ward (Hardcover)
I read Dr.Baxter's book a few month's ago, and I was so impressed by what a wonderful book it is, that I could hardly believe it! I thought it would be another story about AIDS that makes you feel horrible about disease in the world, but I was blessed to discover that a book about such an awful illness could be so uplifting. The author of "The Least of These My Brethren" has seen and dealt with AIDS patients first-hand in a disgusting hospital where AIDS patients seem to have been placed as to cover them and keep them from the public- a way to hide how awful AIDS is. Dr. Baxter is brutally honest about the illness and all the pain it brings. Yet he has somehow managed to take the misery and show you a lighter side that fills you with hope and peace. It's a very well written story that the world should all share.
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book should be an all-time best seller.,
By BellaTerra66 "BellaTerra66" (New Mexico) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Least of These My Brethren: A Doctor's Story of Hope and Miracles on an Inner-City AIDS Ward (Hardcover)
This book is not only very well written and extremely interesting and enlightening, but it's one of the best books I've ever read in my 60 years of life. I would like to believe that it helped me to become a much more compassionate person over the past 10 years.
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