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And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic Paperback – April 9, 2000
| Randy Shilts (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Shilts shows that the epidemic spread wildly because the federal government put budget ahead of the nation's welfare; health authorities placed political expediency before the public health; and scientists were often more concerned with international prestige than saving lives. Against this backdrop, Shilts tells the heroic stories of individuals in science and politics, public health and the gay community, who struggled to alert the nation to the enormity of the danger it faced. And the Band Played On is both a tribute to these heroic people and a stinging indictment of the institutions that failed the nation so badly.
- Print length656 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherStonewall Inn Editions
- Publication dateApril 9, 2000
- Dimensions5.46 x 1.72 x 8.21 inches
- ISBN-109780312241353
- ISBN-13978-0312241353
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Stunning . . . An impressively researched and richly detailed narrative."--Time
"Rivals in power and intensity, and in the brilliance of its reporting and writing, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood."--The Boston Globe
"A monumental history."--The Washington Post Book World
"The most thorough, comprehensive exploration of the AIDS epidemic to date . . . It is fascinating, frightening, and essential reading."--San Francisco Sentinel
"A textbook on how institutions work--or fail to work--in the face of such a threat."--San Francisco Examiner
"A lucid and stunning indictment of public policy toward the vicious disease . . . A valuable work of political history."--Business Week
"Shilts successfully weaves comprehensive investigative reporting and commercial page-turning pacing, political intrigue, and personal tragedy into a landmark book . . . Its importance cannot be overstated."--Publishers Weekly
"A popular history of the early years of the AIDS crisis, the book conveys in detail the political complexities--and many different human dimensions--of the story. Reading Shilts, you wonder who will die next. You worry whether this terrible disease can ever be controlled. And you begin to feel anger at what Shilts portrays as the federal government's dithering . . . Shilts has produced the best--and what will likely be the most controversial--book yet on AIDS. Though many of the details in the book are familiar to veteran reporters, Shilts does not shy away from naming names and casting blame. He writes with passionate conviction, which is one of the book's strengths--and also, of course, a sound reason for some skepticism."--Jim Miller, Newsweek
"Shilts, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle who has covered AIDS full-time since 1983, takes us almost day by day through the first five years of the unfolding epidemic and the responses--confusion and fear, denial and lindifference, courage and determination. It is at once a history and a passionate indictment."--H. Jack Geiger, The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : 0312241356
- Publisher : Stonewall Inn Editions; 1st edition (April 9, 2000)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 656 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780312241353
- ISBN-13 : 978-0312241353
- Item Weight : 1.4 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.46 x 1.72 x 8.21 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,000,393 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #315 in AIDS (Books)
- #5,153 in LGBTQ+ Demographic Studies
- Customer Reviews:
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviewed in the United States on December 16, 2018
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- The American People: Search for My Heart (Larry Kramer)
I wanted to like this book more. There are so many five-star reviews for this book and I get that it is a product of the time period it was written but it seems fitting with this 20th Anniversary edition to also look at the book in its current context and for me there was so much blame in the book it was hard to get the story. When everyone is to blame, is anyone to blame?
“In San Francisco, Bill Kraus attributed the reports of the new diseases to anti-gay bias in the press. Reporters never talked about the constructive things the gay community did, he thought, but let a few people get sick and they’re all over it.”
“The Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York had put the accumulated wisdom of homosexual physicians in one phrase: “Have as much sex as you want, but with fewer people and HEALTHY people.””
At a recent meeting of my gay book club we read a book concerning the Holocaust and one man said that he wished more Jewish people from the time were alive so he could ask them why they didn’t do more. Why didn’t they leave Germany when it became clear the writing was on the wall? I said I was reading this book, And the Band Played On, and similar questions came up. Why didn’t the gay community do more at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic? Why weren’t the bathhouses closed earlier? Why didn’t this man specifically do more?
He said at the time of the start of the AIDS epidemic there were no human rights protections for gay men. If your employer found out you were gay you could lose your job. To me the answer was clear. People were dying but you didn’t want to lose your job. It’s that simple. This is the same answer the Jewish people would give. And this is the answer that frequently appears in this book.
“The invitations were mailed out, but Kramer wondered about what would happen later, when this community really needed something and the people who were supposed to do the demanding were so ashamed of themselves that they didn’t even want their mailmen to know they were gay.”
If Shilts were alive today I would have liked some kind of addendum to this 20th Anniversary Edition acknowledging this, accepting humans as imperfect, and some forgiveness for everyone involved in the mistakes made at the beginning of the epidemic. That was really missing in this book.
So many thoughts as I was reading this, even today advertisements for AIDS medications show people climbing mountains with the attitude of “Now I can ride a bike again!” AIDSSpeak, so dominant in this book, continues to this day with people not wanting to offend People With AIDS in safe sex literature. The gay paper Xtra in Toronto this very week printed an article saying “AIDS is no less treatable than diabetes!” No one still comes out and says “This is preventable and not something you want to get. You can die. Treat yourself well and avoid unnecessary risks.” Will people 20 years from now be asking why we didn’t do more, why we didn’t speak more clearly, why we didn’t make more effort to stop the spread of this disease?
The book could also have used more focus. I remember watching a segment on cable news before Obama was elected and they cut to some guy standing in front of Walmart saying if Obama got elected he’d plant watermelon on the lawn of the White House. There will always be yokels running their mouths, it doesn’t mean you have to give them a platform and I felt too many times Shilts would include quotes from random sources of people with no power simply to sensationalize.
“For some, it appeared that donating blood was an act that could overcome their personal fears about having AIDS. Thus, blood banks occasionally became the stages for gay men living out the psychodramas of denial.”
Some and occasionally are in no way proof of fact.
Referencing my quote at the start of this review, there is too much here. Often the book gets lost in specifics, as in the following quote:
“Heckler said Weiss should proceed in a more “orderly” fashion and said she would have HHS officials help him once he outlined specific questions and areas of research. Weiss had no choice but to call Steinmetz back to Washington.”
Granted it’s taken out of context but all these names and acronyms are often impossible to navigate. There is some humour in the book, but little, and it seems most of the book is concerned with laying blame.
“At best, he tried to counsel the Elizabeth Taylor approach to sexuality and suggest serial monogamy, a series of affairs that may not last forever but that at least left you with a vague awareness of which bed you slept in most evenings.”
“Being gay in New York was something you did on weekends, it seemed. During the week everybody went back to their careers and played the game, carefully concealing their sexuality and acting like everything was okay.”
An interesting aspect that is clear from the reading though is that the Centre for Disease Control really didn’t control a thing during this crisis and was not adequately funded or staffed. Still, this is often framed in blame:
“The CDC had spent $1 million on the outbreak, compared with $9 million on Legionnaire’s disease.”
There is also the eternal struggle that exists in all mentions of US politics of the us-and-them mentality of the Democrats vs the Republicans.
“Thus an epidemic that had wholly unfolded within a Republican administration had a distinctly Democratic cast for Republicans; for Democrats, AIDS was a Republican epidemic.”
No other country that I know of puts people into groups like this and places such weight on it. This lack of ability to see people beyond their political stripes also created problems dealing with this epidemic and that is not at all explored in this book.
In the 25 years since the book was published, some things have changed and some haven’t:
“There was no one to say, “Hang in there.” Instead, there was a prevailing sentiment that was sympathetic and at times compassionate but still detached and ultimately uncaring, as if to imply that, somehow, this whole mess is your own fault.”
The blame continues to this day. At one point in the book drug trials were mentioned with the attitude that patients should be given access to experimental drugs as they had nothing to lose.
“Patients with AIDS and ARC were told to simply wait until the carefully controlled drug studies were completed before trying the experimental drugs—even though many knew they would be dead before that happened.”
Yet this isn’t the full picture. AZT when it was first prescribed was over-prescribed and many people died from the drug before the dosage was corrected. It seems you can’t win. Either you don’t give the patients the drug and they die and you are blamed or you do give them the drug and they die and you are blamed. This comes back to the start of this review, if everyone is to blame, is anyone to blame?
I would have liked acknowledgement that people were in most cases doing their best. The virus was terrible but it brought the community together in a way it never had before and once people realized the seriousness of the disease many crossed party lines to help, even Reagan. Mistakes were made and we should learn from them but the pointing fingers doesn’t let us move on to the healing. As long as “they” are to blame we don’t have to look at ourselves, just like when “they” are dying we don’t have to help as much. 600 pages of anger doesn’t make the situation better.
“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.
Top reviews from other countries
I would recommend this to anyone who is wondering where this current pandemic will end, if it feels like a hopeless situation then the progresses made in the treatments of AIDS may help out this current situation into perspective. If, like me, you have always had a fear of AIDS due to the impressive as campaigns of the late 80s then this may help. Ignorance leads to fear.
If you do read this book you will be angry: the blood banks, the ignorant governments, the self serving sex club owners putting profit above public safety, the petty rivalries and intrigues getting in the way of scientific progress. Oh, wait infinity see how the French got screwed over...













