Reviews with content warning for Medical content - And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

Reading this book in the time of COVID is unsurprisingly prescient. So much rings familiar. The unpreparedness, the underreported case counts, the general selfishness where people refuse to change their behavior while the government bungles messaging on public health. This is also one of the few books I've read of this length that actually needed to be this long. It does a great job of portraying its subjects as complicated humans and as people largely doing the best they could without the clarity that comes with hindsight. As bad as I already thought the Reagan administration was around AIDS, somehow, it was even worse. While frustrating to watch people push back on testing and and closing the bathhouses, it's easy to see why an administration so steeped in the Christian right and homophobia was not to be trusted and why even effective public health measures would be suspect. It's sad to think how many lives could have been saved if rampant homophobia had not existed at the time, or stigma around intravenous drug users and sex work. Things like closing bathhouses and starting HIV testing campaigns would have been less controversial. I was also unaware how much stupid scientific infighting had existed and how much it held up research. People were dying and transfusion AIDS was being dismissed as a possibility while countries fought over whose scientists got to claim discovery and the French scientists ultimately got shorted. Admittedly I did cringe a little at some of the dated language. The general tone in which "Africa" is spoken about is ignorant sounding. "Prostitute" is used widely since "sex worker" was obviously not in wide usage in 1987. Generally, the book is is very Western-centered, which makes sense given the time and what information was available.

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usually_sleep_deprived's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad slow-paced

4.5

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camillatd's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative sad slow-paced

5.0

A gripping, harrowing, and incredibly well-researched piece of investigative journalism, And The Band Played On takes the reader through a detailed account of the first five years of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. I want to first note that as this book was published in 1987, it is certainly not without flaw. In the 35 years since then, the scientific and public health communities have learned much about HIV/AIDS, including the truth behind the assumed "Patient Zero" identified in the early 1980s, Gaetan Dugas. Many have written about Shilts' characterization of Dugas, as well as the other figures featured in the book, so I won't dwell on it here.

The true feat of Randy Shilts' magnum opus is how he makes a 600-page piece of investigative journalism come alive. Dense with figures, medical jargon, and institutional acronyms, And The Band Played On seems like it would be nearly unreadable. But somehow, Shilts weaves these pieces of data into a compelling narrative. He does this primarily by lending humanity and depth to the central figures in the early years of the epidemic. Considering the historiographical context, Shilts' portrayal of those suffering from AIDS would have contrasted sharply with the regular dehumanization of sufferers by the media and the government.

Most of all, this work is a damning indictment of the politicization of disease, systemic homophobia, and the failures of political bureaucracy.

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emmeline's review against another edition

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personally, I didn't vibe with the writing style. that combined with the size of the book and the small font size made this difficult for me to actually pick up and want to finish. I feel like a learned a lot from what I did read, specifically from the medical perspective and how doctors and researchers reacted.

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fawns's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative sad slow-paced

5.0

After watching Pose on Netflix I picked up And The Band Played On to learn more about the AIDS crisis. I was too young to know what was going on when it first started and have continued to know very little. A huge personal oversight.
This book was an excellent read. It is comprehensive and obviously meticulously researched when it comes to the epidemiology and financial aspects of AIDS. I had no idea of the parallels that could be drawn between the way AIDS was handled by the US and Reagan and the way Covid was handled by Trump. Handled in that it was allowed to run rampant with little intervention to protect people by the federal government.
My criticism is that the author focused very little of his writing on how AIDS affected communities of color in the '80s, focusing instead on the white community.
It also would have been instructive to be able to learn more about the front-line activists that did the vast majority of the work to make changes in policy and safety.
Overall, if willing to make the time investment (it's a little over 600 pages), this is a well-done public health history book to read and learn from.

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