A grim reproof to all who want to deny that AIDS has arrived in America's heartland. For five years in the late 1980s, Verghese was an infectious- diseases specialist in Johnson City, a town in northeastern Tennessee; in that time he saw his AIDS patient load soar from 1 to more than 80. AIDS was brought to Johnson City by way of New York, San Francisco, Miami, and elsewhere by prodigal gay sons who, after a few years of freedom, returned home to die. It was brought by way of a truck stop on the interstate where gay locals congregated for anonymous sex. It was brought by way of transfusions of tainted blood. With the observant—but never dispassionate—eye of the clinician, Verghese notes everything about the remarkable, varied patients who seek his help, including: Will Johnson, a Bible Belt entrepreneur who believes AIDS comes from Satan; Luther Hines, whose bitter rage keeps him alive while his body is consumed by tuberculosis, candidiasis, and other infections; Vickie McCray, who faithfully cares for the unfaithful husband who infected her as he sinks into AIDS dementia. Verghese leaves nothing to the imagination as he describes the gruesome effects of the opportunistic infections that attack those with AIDS. He surprises us with unpredictable instances of compassion (friends changing diapers on a man with uncontrollable diarrhea) and cruelty (from members of the medical profession). But this is also Verghese's personal story, which dovetails with that of his patients. As a foreign-born doctor of Indian descent tending outcast patients, he too was a bit of an outsider in rural Tennessee. He is touchingly honest about his own flaws and about the strain his all-consuming medical practice placed on his marriage. Verghese, who has written for the New Yorker and other publications, offers a powerful testimony to the courage of those who live and die with AIDS and of those who care for them. (Book- of-the-Month Club alternate selection; Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection; author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-78514-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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