World AIDS Day: Books

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A heartfelt story of love, grief, and renewal about two unlikely friends who discover that sometimes you don't know you've lost someone until you've found them "A dazzling debut novel."--O: The Oprah Magazine "Tremendously moving."--The Wall Street Journal "Touching and ultimately hopeful."--People   1987. The only person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus is her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can be herself only in Finn's company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June's world is turned upside down.   But Finn's death brings a surprise acquaintance into June's life. At the funeral, June notices a strange man lingering just beyond the crowd. A few days later, she receives a package in the mail containing a beautiful teapot she recognizes from Finn's apartment, and a note from Toby, the stranger, asking for an opportunity to meet. As the two begin to spend time together, June realizes she's not the only one who misses Finn, and that this unexpected friend just might be the one she needs the most.

Pulitzer Prize-winner for Drama, 1993. The first part of Tony Kushner's epic drama of America in the 1980s. "A vast, miraculous play.... provocative, witty and deeply upsetting.... a searching and radical rethinking of American political drama."--Frank Rich, The New York Times #65533;"Daring and dazzling! The most ambitious American play of our time."--Jack Kroll, Newsweek

This "tender and lyrical" memoir (New York Times Book Review) remains one of the most compelling documents of the AIDS era-"searing, shattering, ultimately hope inspiring account of a great love story" (San Francisco Examiner). A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and the winner of the PEN Center West literary award.

In this vibrant memoir, Alysia Abbott recounts growing up in 1970s San Francisco with Steve Abbott, a gay, single father during an era when that was rare. Reconstructing their time together from a remarkable cache of Steve's writings, Alysia gives us an unforgettable portrait of a tumultuous, historic period in San Francisco as well as an exquisitely moving account of a father's legacy and a daughter's love.

This sweeping memoir tells the life story of longtime LGBTQ and AIDS activist Cleve Jones in a profoundly moving account from sexually liberated 1970s San Francisco, through the AIDS crisis, and up to his involvement with the marriage equality battle. When We Rise is not only the story of a hero to the LQBTQ community, but the vibrantly voice memoir of a full and transformative American life.

A riveting, powerful telling of the story of the grassroots movement of activists, many of them in a life-or-death struggle, who seized upon scientific research to help develop the drugs that turned HIV from a mostly fatal infection to a manageable disease. Ignored by public officials, religious leaders, and the nation at large, and confronted with shame and hatred, this small group of men and women chose to fight for their right to live by educating themselves and demanding to become full partners in the race for effective treatments. Around the globe, 16 million people are alive today thanks to their efforts. In dramatic fashion, we witness the founding of ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group), and the rise of an underground drug market in opposition to the prohibitively expensive (and sometimes toxic) AZT. We watch as these activists learn to become their own researchers, lobbyists, drug smugglers, and clinicians, establishing their own newspapers, research journals, and laboratories, and as they go on to force reform in the nation's disease-fighting agencies. Expansive yet richly detailed, this is an insider's account of a pivotal moment in the history of American civil rights.

Upon its first publication more than twenty years ago, And the Band Played on was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of investigative reporting. Shilts' expose revealed why AIDS was allowed to spread unchecked during the early 80's while the most trusted institutions ignored or denied the threat. One of the few true modern classics, it changed and framed how AIDS was discussed in the following years. Now republished in a special 20th Anniversary edition, And the Band Played On remains one of the essential books of our time.

A gripping and triumphant tale of human compassion, is the true story of Ruth Coker Burks, a young single mother in Hot Springs, Arkansas, who finds herself driven to the forefront of the AIDS crisis, and becoming a pivotal activist in America's fight against AIDS. In 1986, 26-year old Ruth visits a friend at the hospital when she notices that the door to one of the hospital rooms is painted red. She witnesses nurses drawing straws to see who would tend to the patient inside, all of them reluctant to enter the room. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and immediately begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. Before she can even process what she's done, word spreads in the community that Ruth is the only person willing to help these young men afflicted by AIDS, and is called upon to nurse them. As she forges deep friendships with the men she helps, she works tirelessly to find them housing and jobs, even searching for funeral homes willing to take their bodies. Throughout the years, Ruth defies local pastors and nurses to help the men she cares for: Paul and Billy, Angel, Chip, Todd and Luke. Emboldened by the weight of their collective pain, she fervently advocates for their safety and visibility, ultimately advising Governor Bill Clinton on the national HIV-AIDS crisis. This deeply moving and elegiac memoir honors the extraordinary life of Ruth Coker Burks and the beloved men who fought valiantly for their lives with AIDS during a most hostile and misinformed time in America.

Four decades have passed since reports of a mysterious "gay cancer" first appeared in US newspapers. In the ensuing years, the pandemic that would come to be called AIDS changed the world in innumerable ways. It also gave rise to one of the late twentieth century's largest health-based empowerment movements. Scholars across diverse traditions have documented the rise of the AIDS activist movement, chronicling the impassioned echoes of protestors who took to the streets to demand "drugs into bodies." And yet not all activism creates echoes. Included among the ranks of 1980s and 1990s-era AIDS activists were individuals whose expressions of empowerment differed markedly from those demanding open access to mainstream pharmaceutical agents. Largely forgotten today, this activist tradition was comprised of individuals who embraced unorthodox approaches for conceptualizing and treating their condition. Rejecting biomedical expertise, they shared alternative clinical paradigms, created underground networks for distributing unorthodox nostrums, and endorsed etiological models that challenged the association between HIV and AIDS. The Sounds of Furious Living seeks to understand the AIDS activist tradition, identifying the historical currents out of which it arose. Embracing a patient-centered, social historical lens, it traces historic shifts in popular understanding of health and perceptions of biomedicine through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to explain the lasting appeal of unorthodox health activism into the modern era.

In the decades since it was identified in 1981, HIV/AIDS has devastated African American communities. Members of those communities mobilized to fight the epidemic and its consequences from the beginning of the AIDS activist movement. They struggled not only to overcome the stigma and denial surrounding a "white gay disease" in Black America, but also to bring resources to struggling communities that were often dismissed as too "hard to reach." To Make the Wounded Whole offers the first history of African American AIDS activism in all of its depth and breadth. Dan Royles introduces a diverse constellation of activists, including medical professionals, Black gay intellectuals, church pastors, Nation of Islam leaders, recovering drug users, and Black feminists who pursued a wide array of grassroots approaches to slow the epidemic's spread and address its impacts. Through interlinked stories from Philadelphia and Atlanta to South Africa and back again, Royles documents the diverse, creative, and global work of African American activists in the decades-long battle against HIV/AIDS.

A dazzling novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris. In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

A deeply personal account of Elton John's life during the era of AIDS and an inspiring call to action. In the 1980s, Elton John saw friend after friend, loved one after loved one, perish needlessly from AIDS. He befriended Ryan White, a young Indiana boy ostracized because of his HIV infection. Ryan's inspiring life and devastating death led Elton to two realizations: His own life was a mess. And he had to do something to help stop the AIDS crisis. Since then, Elton has dedicated himself to overcoming the plague and the stigma of AIDS. The Elton John AIDS Foundation has raised and donated $275 million to date to fighting the disease worldwide. Love Is the Cure includes stories of Elton's close friendships with Ryan White, Freddie Mercury, Princess Diana, Elizabeth Taylor, and others, and the story of the Elton John AIDS Foundation.

Sean Strub arrived in Washington, D.C. in 1976 harbouring a terrifying secret: his attraction to men. As Strub explored the capital's political and social circles, he discovered a parallel world where powerful men lived double lives shrouded in shame. When the AIDS epidemic hit in the early '80s, Strub turned to activism to combat discrimination and demand research. Strub takes readers through his own diagnosis and inside ACT UP, the activist organisation that transformed a stigmatised cause into one of the defining political movements of our time.

"The Invisible Epidemic tells the dramatic, heartbreaking, and often inspiring story of women and the AIDS epidemic, revealing the startling truths behind the statistics and the experiences of the many women at the forefront of AIDS activism, prevention, and caretaking. Tracing the chronology of what happened when a number of women across the country recognized the extent to which HIV/AIDS was endangering women and attempted to do something about it, Gena Corea exposes once and for all the "invisible" nature of women's place in the AIDS crisis and confronts the inaccuracies behind the many long-held assumptions of the primarily male medical community, the media, and the often misinformed general public." "From the first cases of young women dying of "pneumonia" in the early 1980s, to widespread denial of the threat of AIDS to women in ensuing years, to the disturbing discoveries of the recent past, The Invisible Epidemic makes clear that the historical precedent for inadequate research into women's health concerns has prevented any intelligent assessment of women's risk or models for women's care and treatment." "Ultimately, The Invisible Epidemic brings sharply into focus the extent to which AIDS has become not just a health issue, but a much larger social issue that threatens all of us."

Women are disproportionately affected by HIV and AIDS. By focusing on the pandemic at its epicentre in Southern Africa, this book explores the gendered power inequalities driving women's vulnerability to HIV and provides suggestions of how to individually and collectively address women's oppression.