#753 in our old book database. Not rated.

This book has been around for a while, but it reads almost like a murder mystery or a thriller. It chronicles the beginning of the AIDS crisis, including the CDC rushing to contain the devastation. ( )

Shilts' contemporary account of the advent of what is now HIV/AIDS is truly a classic. Shilts takes an unbiased, journalistic approach to the science surrounding the discovery of the "GRID" complex, the underlying virus, the epidemiology required to figure out how the disease was spread as well as the international politics limiting the closing of the bathhouses, treatment, testing of the blood supply and delaying the correct taxonomy of HIV.

Interspersed with this, Shilts shows the ready a very personal view of the stories of individuals affected by HIV/AIDS and their personal struggles both as patients and as advocates. These interspersed narratives are touching and strong, and completely unfictionalized.

Although it would be easy for these one of the many different components of the narrative to become overwhelmed by the vastness and intricacy of the story that Shilts is telling, he handles each of these components deftly, making the 600 page book a manageable and entertaining read.

Although And the Band Played On is now over 20 years old, it was the first comprehensive account of the advent of HIV/AIDS, it was an instant classic in its time and its contemporary nature lends an honesty to the homophobia, politicking and counter-productive maneuvering on all sides that would likely be glossed over in a modern telling. ( )

Someone tries to do something to fight the spread of AIDS, and everyone else tries to thwart that person. Repeat for 605 pages. One of the most emotionally brutal books I've ever read. ( )

I didn't finish this. Reads like bad journalism. The story is, of course, tragic, but the various accounts ring false like the stories that actors tell. For example, we find: "On a hunch, Gottlieb twisted some arms to convince pathologists to take a small scraping of the patient's lung tissue through a nonsurgical maneuver." OK, so the author isn't a doctor, but 1. pathologists don't do endobronchial biopsies, pulmonologists do, 2.nobody has to twist a pulmonologists arm to do an endobronchial biopsy or for a pathologist to interpret one, 3.I was around when AIDS showed up and we were fascinated by it and were eager to get that material, 4.Since this little sentence has things in it that I know are false, what is the author saying with it - is he building a case? Many other stories ring false and have doubtless been spun somehow, after all this book has a message and the author is the man with a hammer. I am reminded of the oft noticed phenomenon that when you have personal knowledge of a newspaper story, you are startled by its errors (for example, if you were the one interviewed), and then realize that the stories that you know nothing about are probably similarly inaccurate. The story of AIDS deserves better than this. ( )

A fascinating book that would have benefitted from tighter editing. Shilts tracks the AIDS epidemic in the US from inception through about 1987 in very fine detail. The research behind this book is incredible. It's all there - - the history, the medical and political players, the statistics, and also some anecdotes of AIDS sufferers and what they went through.

The theme of the book is that the US didn't exactly do the best job of containing AIDS, and there seems to be plenty of blame to go around. Shilts mostly focuses on the lack of funding from the federal government, but blood banks, the various federal agencies, the local mayors, the gay community, and even researchers all had a part to play in the slow response. No one escapes his scrutiny.

All in all, this book is a very comprehensive look at an extremely scary situation, but I have to knock off one star for its essential repetitiveness. The book is organized chronologically, and I think there were better approaches that would have shortened the book (over 600 pages) and would have made it more accessible to the average reader. But very, very good for anyone with an interest in science and politics and how the two intersect in ways that aren't always good for society. ( )

I had been wanting to read this book for a long time and when I finally got around to it, it was a difficult read - not only because my copy was over 600 pages of densely packed font, but also because there is simply so much information and so many names coming at the reader. In tracing the AIDS epidemic throughout the 1980s, there are so many facets of the story, and it often switches between locations so concentration is key. For that reason I found I could only read 10 or so pages at a time before I needed to put the book down for a rest.

But for all that it almost felt like homework, it was an illuminating read, and I have kept my copy to read again in future. Randy Shilts was an American journalist and author, who obviously meticulously researched his subject and in the end delivered not just a timeline of an epidemic that ravaged the gay community, but a searing indictment on the Reagan administration who ignored it all for years despite thousands of people dying and despite being told frequently that this disease was tearing through the country. This book horrified me and made me furious at the lack of regard for the AIDS victims.

Shilts describes how in the early 1980s several young gay men started presenting with an unusual skin cancer, which led to much speculation about its cause. While doctors and scientists could see fairly quickly that there was a huge problem in the offing, and worked tirelessly to try to find the cause, they were up against not just an indifferent federal government, but politics at all levels, the gay community themselves, many of whom resented being advised to lessen their sexual activities, and the abhorrent negligence of such places as many blood banks in America, who refused to start testing their blood even after it was proven that AIDS could be caught through infected transfused blood. The national and local press were also largely uninterested in a disease that only affected gay men.

Amongst the scientific challenges and breakthroughs - including one very interesting narrative about the rivalry between American and French scientists - and the grass roots political attempts to get the Reagan administration interested in this disease, there are tales of key people in the epidemic, many of whom succumbed to AIDS themselves. These for me were some of the most interesting parts, as they focussed on the human aspect of living with a disease, or seeing friend after friend pass away. It portrayed the desperation and hopelessness that people felt, and the anger at their government for ignoring them. I often found myself googling certain people and events to find out more about them - which was another reason it took me such a long time to read this book.

So not an easy read, but an extremely worthwhile one and definitely worth the investment of time and concentration. ( )

I waited a long time to read this, but it’s probably good that I did because it allowed comparison between AIDS and COVID:
• Mixed messages from medical authorities. Author Randy Shilts documents a doctor with the NIH suggesting that AIDS could be spread by routine household contact. This caused no end of problem for AIDS patients; nurses refused to enter a room with an AIDS patient, parents demanded children with AIDS be removed from schools, etc. The person who made this statement – picked up by all the news media – was Doctor Anthony Fauci). For COVID, the WHO insisted for two years that the virus was not airborne and was spread by contact with surfaces.
• Refusal to admit that personal choices were a factor in disease transmission (note: I am NOT saying being gay is a personal choice, but anonymous sex with multiple partners is). It proved gut-wrenchingly hard to get gays to stop engaging in promiscuous sexual activities even though there was abundant evidence that this facilitated disease transmission; it proved gut-wrenchingly hard to get Evangelicals to stop singing in church choirs even though there was abundant evidence that this facilitated disease transmission.
• Pseudoscience in abundance. People with AIDS went to faith healers, psychics, and dubious Mexican clinics and later (after Shilts wrote) claimed the disease was genetically engineered. People with COVID took horse dewormer and claimed the disease was a Liberal plot.
There are obviously a lot of differences, though; politicians were active almost immediately in the COVID epidemic but were mostly indifferent to AIDS (Shilts notes that there were some unexpected political positions; devout Mormon senator Orrin Hatch and Republican governor George Deukmejian both supported government spending on AIDS while liberal governors Mario Cuomo and Michael Dukakis shortchanged AIDS research). The COVID virus was rapidly identified, while HIV took years to track down; this gave ammunition to people who opposed shutting down bathhouses and testing blood donations because it could be claimed “the cause of AIDS isn’t known”. Vaccines for COVID were developed astonishingly quickly while AIDS vaccine is still off in the indeterminate future.

Shilts’ book is a tragedy; the reader gets acquainted with vital, interesting people. And then those people notice a telltale purple spot. Shilts spreads the blame around; it isn’t just Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan, it’s Ed Koch and the New York Times. And it’s gays themselves; an activist laments “we fought for the right to have all the sex we wanted; we should have fought for the right to get married”. I found Shilts’ story gripping and moving. Other readers complained that the story jumped around too much, shifting from New York to San Francisco to Washington to Paris, but I found that added to my interest. I wish Shilts had discussed public health history more; the cornerstones of public health for infectious diseases have always been quarantine and contact tracing – but those didn’t happen with AIDS. I understand the reasons why, but I wish Shilts would have discussed them some more. No footnotes or bibliography, but there’s a section on sources, mostly interviews, in the end matter. A very good index. ( )

This is a wonderful book about how AIDS was discovered in the U.S. (and Europe, and the rest of the world...but the book is pretty U.S.-centered) in the early 1980s. The author wanted to demonstrate that AIDS could have been prevented a lot earlier and a lot better, and AIDS treatment could have been developed a lot earlier, if only multiples parties including federal government, state government, city government, gay activists, blood bank operators, scientists, and news media did their job properly. The book was pretty long, with the author basically developing a chapter to each month in 1981, 1982 and 1983, and also plenty of chapters on 1984 and 1985. While detailing the plight of selected AIDS patients, congressional aid's repeatedly failed attempts to get federal funding or recognition, AIDS doctor's repeatedly failed attempts to provide better AIDS treatment and receive more funding, and the CDC's repeatedly failed attempts to have a coordinated strategy to control the spread of AIDS, the author regularly updates the reader on how many patients contracted AIDS so far and how many people died from the disease. Everybody who had a chance to make things better for AIDS patients have a thousand probably good excuses on why they didn't do their job as well as they might have had. In the meantime, patients just pass away. It's a sobering read.

I find some interesting parallels between how people responded to public health policy on AIDS in the 1980s versus how people are responding to public health policy on COVID nowadays. Both now and back then, I see concern over political implications, science entangled in politics, and a back-and-forth choice between preserving individual rights versus maintaining public health. ( )

It would help if you knew a bit about Harvey Milk before you start this book, but it's a good introduction to the AIDS epidemic. ( )

“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. ( )

I recall from looking over my journal from back then that this book was extremely engaging. It made me angry at times. I wrote more in my journal, but I will keep it there. I did note that I enjoyed the book, which I found to be very well documented. Also it felt like reading fiction in a way I could not quite describe. Don't get me wrong though; I was fully aware this was real. This was what kept my sense of anger and outrage inflamed. Let's just say the U.S. does not come out looking good in this book and leave at that. There were a lot of failures, and a lot of moments where compassion and humanity were missing, yet also moments of extreme humanity as well.

Overall, this is a definitive history of the early days of the AIDS epidemic. ( )

i can't imagine that there will ever be a more comprehensive or exhaustive book (of journalism or any other kind) about the early years of the aids epidemic. this is just so detailed, so seemingly even-handed, so full of history and science and personal anecdotes. it's such an important and such a hard read. shilts does a truly excellent job of showing what was happening on all sides of the issue through every stage. (socially, politically, personally, etc.)

the first time i read this was in (or near) sept 2003. it absolutely shattered me. i mean shattered. while i had forgotten a lot of the details and specifics, i am not sure i ever fully recovered from reading this book the first time. i was a bit nervous about rereading it because of how deeply i was affected by it; i might even be able to say that this book tangibly changed the course of my life, but that might be a bit extreme, i'm not sure. either way, i was utterly gutted by this the first time, and for good reason.

the information here is so unbelievable, so hard to accept, and so important to understand. it was crushing to my naive, idealist self, the one who believed that people genuinely have each other's best interests at heart, that government is supposed to work for the people, and especially that scientific institutions are there to do the work of science and to help people.

there are few heroes in this book. even the good people fighting the good fight stopped short or made excuses or only decided to fight when it was long past the time to make that decision. and as for everyone else - well, it's almost incomprehensible how callous and self-serving people were, throwing other people's lives away like they were so much garbage. (and i only say "almost" because of the time we're living in right now, with the trump administration. honestly i'm sure that there are awful things done by every administration, but some are worse than others, and both trump and reagan qualify.) it's stunning what was left to happen, and how many were left to die (and die horribly) for political expediency and bigotry. i believed in things, and in people, before reading this book for the first time. the reality of the infighting between the world's largest science institutions, the lying to protect an uncaring administration, the value placed on some lives versus others, that there is a cost/benefit weighed even when people's (*thousands* of people's) lives are in the balance, and even the resistance to changing behavior or societal norms when necessary - all put together it was crushing to see that, at its base, people are out for profit. whether that's in making their business thrive, saving their business money, getting an award, getting more money in a grant, making less work for themselves, getting to do what they want regardless of how it harms others, or myriad other ways - it's just about what's best for themselves, irregardless of everyone else.

when they saw this new disease and realized it looked fatal, they (and i mean the government, the pharmaceutical companies, the scientists, the bathhouse owners) didn't care because it was happening at first to gay men and because it would cost them money and work to do something about it. really and truly they didn't care. reagan in particular wasn't willing to do anything about it; while thousands of people were dying, he wouldn't even think about it. and he was allowed to get away with it by his administration and everyone else in government, scientists, the media. no one cared enough to do something about it. (sure, a few people here and there tried, and some even tried hard, but no one was willing to take a step that would go against their boss or make a statement to the media so people would understand what was really happening. even the "good guys" in the story are often letting 16 months go by before pressing an issue, or are lying to congress about the administration, or not subpoenaing documents to save someone embarrassment, etc.) the world didn't care until someone famous (rock hudson) died. it's the most appalling history of disinterest, lying, under-funding, under-educating, misleading, hoarding of information to the detriment of science, that is imaginable. literally every step of the way they fucked it up more than before, and people died because of it. literally every step of the way they had a chance to finally make it right (at least for the people not yet infected or infected but not symptomatic) and they entrenched themselves deeper into the path of death. it's an incredible story and one that makes a person lose faith in just about everything. truly. such a hard, but important story. i'm not sure i can put myself through reading it ever again, though.

(ok, you have to read between the lines to find them, but there are heroes - the people themselves who had aids and didn't hide it, who said what it was. the people who cared for them. the guy (cliff montgomery maybe?) who started the aids ward that allowed the patient to decide who could visit, the activists and even the congresspeople who asked some hard questions, expecting that they were being given honest answers. even orrin hatch asked for more money when reagan gave too little (but i'll never call him a hero). there were people giving everything they had to fight this. and by "this" i mean not just the virus, but the politics, the media, the society, the culture, even the gay community that wouldn't accept certain things or allow certain things to be said. a perfect confluence of things to make it so completely fucked up. so yes, some heroes, but they were mostly the everyday people dealing with the devastation of the virus, not the people we needed to be heroes.)

from the prologue, this really made me think of where we are right now with climate change: "By the time America paid attention to the disease, it was too late to do anything about it."

it was hard for me to understand truly how strapped the scientists were for money, how the reagan administration wouldn't approve anything for aids research, until this sentence: "At one point, Don Francis ordered a basic textbook on retroviruses, only to have the requisition refused. The CDC could not afford even $150 for a textbook."

while the reagan administration was particularly egregious in its handling (by completely ignoring) of the aids virus, everyone failed. largely because it most (initially) affected the gay community. but everyone failed. the media failed. scientists failed. (although international scientists sure did a better job. so i should say american scientists failed.) gay community leaders failed (although they failed less often). local governments failed. everyone down the line failed. and so many people died. and are still dying. if the world health organization is to be believed, 35 million people have died from aids. had action been taken - reasonable, basic action - when it first appeared, most of those people would be alive today. i mean only a few hundred might have died. what contributions are we without because their lives, mostly gay lives at the outset, weren't valued?

it's overwhelmingly sad. i'm not shattered, reading it this time, likely because i was never quite whole again (it's hard to unknow the stuff that you can't be an idealist and know) but i'm shaken. so important, this book, for so many reasons. ( )

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. ( )

My mother asked me about what I'd been reading lately. When I told her, she made a sound of recognition. "It's kind of like a detective novel, isn't?" she mused. "Except the murderer is a virus."

Indeed—especially as Randy Shilts has written it. And the Band Played On covers the AIDS crisis from 1980, the year doctors began to notice a pattern of unusual illness in gay men in San Francisco, to 1985, the year Rock Hudson was outed as gay and a person with AIDS. At over 600 pages, And the Band Played On is perhaps the most comprehensive overview of the early days of the AIDS crisis. It's particularly illuminating for those of us who were born or came of age after the crisis. I was born in 1991, years after we had identified the AIDS virus and established how it was transmitted. I grew up with safe sex lectures and mandatory blood testing; it was shocking to learn how cavalier people were about safe sex, and how far the blood industry went to avoid testing the blood supply.

It would be easy to cast people as heroes and villains, but Shilts goes out of his way to humanize everyone involved. Those he cannot cast in a good light he at least casts in a way that allows us to understand them. He does it almost too well. His characters were so compelling that I found it hard to maintain interest in the political and medical science aspects. I was interested in the discovery of the virus; I was less interested in the subsequent battle between the French and the Americans as to who deserved credit for the discovery. By the end, I had stopped reading the medical science scenes altogether.

But these are small quibbles. And the Band Played On captures a moment in history we'd be remiss to forget. It's recommended reading for everyone, but especially Gen Z and Millenials and those who want to understand the history of gay rights and social justice. ( )

(38) I am continuing this new foray into influential non-fiction. I have formerly been a novel only kind of gal and I realize now how limiting this predilection has been. So, obviously really late to the party with this one. I have always wanted to read this; I think I may have seen parts of the HBO movie at some point.

This is written by a SF journalist who himself eventually died of AIDS ( had no idea!) - I think he does a commendable job avoiding inserting himself into the narrative. He is as scathing with his portrayal of the gay communiy's hurtful political correctness which hampered public health efforts to stop the spread (AIDS-speak) as he is with homophobic at worst or indifferent to the plight of gay people at best media and government people of the times. I really had not realized how progressive our media and society has become until I compared it with what went on in the 80's. You couldn't use the word "gay" in newspaper articles - really?

So while engaging medical and social history of a time I lived through - with both my own "before" and "after" being my entrance into medical training and how the disease has changed over time -- critically speaking the book was all over the place. I could not follow the organization or the themes of each chapter and section (?the fault of a Kindle vs the fault of the author.) I sometimes felt I could pick this book up at any random point and read a paragraph and it would virtually be saying the same thing - there was no money for research, no one supported our efforts, people are dying. . . . I actually would have liked more science and more medical history re: the African connection. I am not sure what to think about the patient zero parts - I was most engaged when reading about this one individual who may (or more likely may not)have brought HIV to North America.

This book on the whole was at its best in the beginning - relayed almost like a mystery with the first few medical articles and the statistics surrounding the first cluster of cases diagnosed. It did surely bog down in the middle and eventually ground to a halt. But I agree, an important book and one that still resonates today. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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." ( )

This was one of many re-reads for me. I still marvel at the incredible reportage of this tour-de-force. ( )

This is a book that I came across in a sales display in a Blackwell bookshop, and as it was only £2, I bought it. Its size meant I was hesitant to pick it up, but once I actually did I was engaged from the first page on. Originally published in 1987, it charts the response to AIDS in the United States in the first half of 1980s, so it makes for a rather rage-inducing as well as depressing reading matter of wilful ignorance, inaction, callousness and in-fighting. On a more personal level, it certainly took me back to being a teenager in the mid-to-late-1990s and trying to read everything my smallish local library had about AIDS. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )