by James P. Driscoll ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2020
A rambling, rancorous but often gripping account of a crucial chapter in the war against AIDS.
A memoir recalls the struggle to liberate AIDS drugs from an obstructionist federal agency—and the “quislings” in the gay activist movement.
Driscoll recounts the period from 1988 to 1996 when he and other gay activists fought to get the Food and Drug Administration to expedite approval of new AIDS drugs, especially the revolutionary protease-inhibitor cocktails. In the author’s telling, it’s a disturbing story of a risk-averse bureaucracy delaying lifesaving medical innovation. The FDA insisted that approval of AIDS drugs required huge, expensive, multiyear efficacy studies to see if they substantially prolonged life. Activists countered that those standards should be relaxed for a fatal disease with no good treatment, and that quicker testing for safety and performance metrics—like reduction of viral load—was sufficient. (Driscoll and his allies won the battle and were proven right in 1996 when the expedited approval of protease inhibitors dramatically reduced death tolls.) The work is also an epic of political intrigue and infighting in the gay community. The author and his allies, mostly based in San Francisco, departed from activist orthodoxy to work pragmatically with pharmaceutical companies and Republican politicians, including Vice President Dan Quayle, to push reform of the FDA approval process. They were opposed by left-wing gay activists in New York who, Driscoll contends, were in lock step with the Democratic establishment and its FDA clients and therefore resisted measures to speed up drug approval. The upshot was a divisive contest over policy and turf, in which the author weathered public vitriol and private threats from pro-FDA activists and attempts to expel him from the AIDS-activism organization ACT UP.
Driscoll pulls no punches in castigating his opponents of decades past. He calls the FDA “the Fascist Drug Agency,” and decries it as a quagmire of “regulatory featherbedding, dysfunction and corruption,” thanks to then-FDA Commissioner David Kessler’s “love of bureaucratic power.” The author goes on to denounce the New York activist crowd for a level of corruption that brought to mind the Hollywood noir Chinatown. In a lengthy appendix, ACT UP founder Larry Kramer emerges as an erratic figure with a “cyclopean” fixation on corporate greed. Personal wounds also get opened, as in a digression on Driscoll’s Ph.D. adviser, whom he describes as a malevolent homophobe. This acid-etched commentary is twined into a memoir that’s lucid and cogent in chunks but has a disorganized, repetitive structure that jumbles together science, reprints of articles, and political wrangling. At his best, the author offers a shrewd, engrossing primer on effective activism as he recollects how he coordinated street protests, punchy PR, and backroom lobbying. In one masterful maneuver, he got Quayle’s aides to summon FDA officials to the vice presidential office and confront them with anguished AIDS patients desperate for new drugs. Driscoll is also affecting when he recalls the loss of friends and loved ones. (“It was terrible to watch those bright, talented, kind, beautiful young men wilt and die, sometimes slowly, but often in only a few months or weeks. You were laughing, planning, and sharing ideas with them one week; a month later you were attending their memorial service.”) These quiet, heartfelt passages give a sense of the tragic stakes driving all the byzantine power plays.
A rambling, rancorous but often gripping account of a crucial chapter in the war against AIDS.Pub Date: April 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68053-140-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Academica Press
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
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A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton
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by Brandon Stanton ; photographed by Brandon Stanton
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by Pamela Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
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The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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