An accessible, universal, heartbreaking, and gut-wrenching AIDS chronicle.
In this debut book, two nurses show how the advent of the HIV infection permanently altered a vulnerable minority and the boundaries of global health care.
Based on actual events in their lives, career clinicians Matzer and Hughes begin their intensive, exquisitely moving narrative at the end of the 1970s in a Manhattan hospital where rapid-onset, opportunistic infections like pneumocystis carinii pneumonia first began immobilizing gay men at alarming rates. From the first hints of a “Gay Cancer” to future milestones in disease developments and pharmaceutical intervention, the authors diligently and compassionately narrate firsthand how a community joined together throughout the ’80s and ’90s to care for the dying, to inspire solidarity through candlelight vigils, to extinguish stigma and shame, and to fight for the right to die with dignity. With seamless ease, the book’s timeline smoothly oscillates back and forth from Matzer’s and Hughes’ historical trajectories through their grueling nursing school years into their close friendship and essential work with AIDS patients. Supplementing this poignant chronicle are reflections from both authors on the positive and negative aspects of that indelible era. As an open lesbian who was closeted when the epidemic began, Hughes remarks that she used to view the entire period of death and disease “through my identity as a gay woman, but lately, I think I have viewed it as a New Yorker. I felt that way especially after 9/11.” For lay readers, clinical footnotes are sprinkled throughout, offering explanations and specific terminology on disease symptoms and medical procedures. Structured in an intensely personalized manner with heartfelt prose and intimate, exacting details, the work ushers readers right into the authors’ AIDS ward, where sick men and women lay dying, at the mercy of homophobia and cruel bias, as disease researchers rushed to demystify and mitigate the medical carnage while perplexed politicians vacillated. The book is also a touching tribute to the resilience of a community; its unified, unconditional allies; and the human kindness that continues to interconnect everyone in times of horrific atrocities. “Despite all the bullshit that happens,” Matzer declares, “most of us come together when we need to.”
An accessible, universal, heartbreaking, and gut-wrenching AIDS chronicle.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-951072-01-8
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Tree District Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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