How to Survive a Plague

Starred review from December 12, 2016
Journalist France (Our Fathers) illuminates the origins and progress of the fight against AIDS in this moving mix of memoir and reportage, a companion book to his eponymous Academy Awardânominated 2012 documentary. He covers a revolution in drug development that occurred as patients, for the first time, "joined in the search for their own salvation." France begins in 1981, when a buried New York Times story first identified a "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals," and continues through 1996, when a medical system transformed by activism delivered treatments that rendered AIDS a manageable illness. He juxtaposes his personal involvement with that of a group of self-proclaimed "HIVIPs," key ACT UP leaders from their Treatment + Data Committee whose collective mission was getting the medical establishment to put "drugs into bodies." Eventually, ACT UP became unwieldy and the group spun-off into the Treatment Action Group. France shares with passion and pathos the personal battles of these activists, offering both plaudits and opprobrium to an array of players who constituted the fabric of the community. As important as Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On was in 1987, France's work is a must-read for a new generation of empowered patients, informed medical practitioners, and challenged caregiversâlest history repeat itself.

October 1, 2016
How scientists and citizens banded together to lift the death sentence from AIDS.It may be hard for anyone not alive at the time to comprehend how devastatingly the AIDS epidemic announced itself in the early 1980s and how resolute the Ronald Reagan government was in doing nothing about it. Emblematic was Jesse Helms, the North Carolina segregationist senator who argued in support of an amendment bearing his name to prohibit research and treatment funding, which he said would promote, encourage, or condone homosexual activities. Other bills introduced at the time included a suite that, among other things, sought to bar people with AIDS from practicing in the health care industry, even as X-ray technicians. Matters in the government did not begin to turn around, writes documentarian/journalist France (Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal, 2004), until the Democrats took the White House, following a testy exchange with activists in which candidate Bill Clinton cast himself as a better friend to people with AIDS than people with AIDS themselves. It was those activists and their unflagging efforts, France documents, that kept the matter of AIDS and funding for its treatment in the public eye and on the political table, and while the long battle exhausted manyas France writes, there was a second epidemic of drug use, attributable to the self-medication of the traumatizedit was also extraordinarily effective in rallying both public and scientific/medical support. The result was a transformation of the diseasenot just a physical one, with medications developed and made available that could regenerate a persons immune system, but also a social one, with much of the stigma lifted from the ill. All this, as the author notes in closing, was accomplished by angry, vocal people out in the streetsa very good lesson for activists engaged in other issues today. A lucid, urgent updating of Randy Shilts And the Band Played On (1987) and a fine work of social history.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 1, 2016
Safe sex, the rainbow motif, AZT and protease inhibitors, GLAAD, scientific squabbles, Ryan White, CD4s, and the AIDS Memorial Quiltjournalist and award-winning film documentarian France brilliantly chronicles AIDS in America during the 1980s and 1990s. His powerful account captures the turbulence and the emotionshope, despair, anger, loss, betrayal, abandonment, terrorthat gripped those infected and those not. He concludes, Nobody left those years uncorrupted. France focuses on the heroes of the epidemic, primarily AIDS activists whose names are mostly unknown to the general public. Groups (such as the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and individuals alike committed themselves to political advocacy, community outreach (self-help programs and education), fundraising for research, and protest. Their battle wasn't only against the complex, rapidly mutating HIV retrovirus that melted immune systems and destroyed lives (mostly young gay men) but also ignorance, prejudice, and fear. France identifies the foul truths that a microscopic virus had revealed about American culture: politicians who welcomed the plague as proof of God's will, doctors who refused the victims medical care, ministers and often even parents themselves who withheld all but a shiver of grief. American history, memoir, public health, and a call-to-action are perfectly and passionately blended here. Spectacular and soulful.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

Starred review from September 1, 2016

Prepare to have your heart buoyed and broken in this riveting account of the response to the AIDS epidemic that's as educational as it is difficult to put down. Based on thorough research and the author's own experience as a gay man and a reporter in New York when the disease emerged, this book presents the fear, hope, and civil rights struggles of the 1980s and 1990s. In unflinching, brutally honest detail, France traces the lives of the people behind the constellations of aid and advocacy movements and presents their struggles in a way that will have readers stirred by each diagnosis, cheering the efforts to find a cure, and growing frustrated at the political establishments that ignored the terrible tragedy as it unfolded. Readers will learn of the medical efforts, the clashes of personalities within groups such as the Gay Men's Health Crisis, and the people who raised awareness of a disease that would claim hundreds of thousands of lives. VERDICT This highly engaging account is a must-read for anyone interested in epidemiology, civil rights, gay rights, public health, and American history. [See Prepub Alert, 5/23/16; see "Editors' Fall Picks," p. 30.]--Susanne Caro, Univ. of Montana Lib., Missoula

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2016

A contributing editor at New York magazine who has covered the AIDS epidemic since its inception, France directed the Academy Award-nominated documentary How To Survive a Plague, the basis of this book. Here he profiles leading activists and groups, chronicles the rise of an underground drug market to counter the astronomically priced AZT, and more. With a seven-city tour.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2016

Prepare to have your heart buoyed and broken in this riveting account of the response to the AIDS epidemic that's as educational as it is difficult to put down. Based on thorough research and the author's own experience as a gay man and a reporter in New York when the disease emerged, this book presents the fear, hope, and civil rights struggles of the 1980s and 1990s. In unflinching, brutally honest detail, France traces the lives of the people behind the constellations of aid and advocacy movements and presents their struggles in a way that will have readers stirred by each diagnosis, cheering the efforts to find a cure, and growing frustrated at the political establishments that ignored the terrible tragedy as it unfolded. Readers will learn of the medical efforts, the clashes of personalities within groups such as the Gay Men's Health Crisis, and the people who raised awareness of a disease that would claim hundreds of thousands of lives. VERDICT This highly engaging account is a must-read for anyone interested in epidemiology, civil rights, gay rights, public health, and American history. [See Prepub Alert, 5/23/16; see "Editors' Fall Picks," p. 30.]--Susanne Caro, Univ. of Montana Lib., Missoula

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.