This is a serious, lengthy non-fiction book which reads like a novel--a suspensful thriller. It's a good book, a powerful book, and an angry book: a political and social history of the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the United States.

Randy Shilts, an investigative reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle (and the first openly gay one), spent years writing it and didn't attempt any kind of journalistic objectivity or neutrality--it was a very personal project for him. He named names and pointed fingers, and there was plenty of blame to go around: the Reagan administration didn't allocate adequate funding for research; some scientists were more concerned with prestige than progress, and competed rather than collaborated; political expediency won out over public health; the media was squeamish regarding homosexuality, and carelessly created panic; many in the gay community itself were in denial and refused to modify their behavior...the list goes on. Just as the band played on...business as usual until the death toll became too large to be ignored.

The author himself told the New York Times that he refrained from being tested for HIV until he finished the book, published in 1987; he became ill in 1992 and AIDS killed him two years later. He was 42.

The book is extremely sad but not entirely hopeless; there are personal stories of love, kindness, devotion, physicians and nurses and scientists who went above and beyond. Mr Shilts hoped, in its publication, that this would be a cautionary tale, and that compassion, acceptance, and equality would, in time, triumph over ignorance and fear, and that people would come before profit.

BOOK: And the Band Played On

AUTHOR: Randy Shilts

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 1987

IMAGE: book cover, St. Martin's Griffin