Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath

Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath
by Andrew Holleran

Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath
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Book Summary Information

Author: Andrew Holleran
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-05-12
ISBN: 0786720395
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Da Capo Press

Book Reviews of Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath

Book Review: Andrew Holleran At His Best
Summary: 5 Stars

When Andrew Holleran burst on the gay literary scene with DANCER FROM THE DANCE we knew we had never read anything quite this wonderful before that was about us. He has consistently written fine novels since that time and continues to fill a needed niche in gay literature, whatever that term means. I have read and own every book he has written, and always looked forward to reading his columns in the gay literary magazine "Christopher Street." Now twenty years after the collection of essays dealing with AIDS was published as GROUND ZERO, he has revisited that volume, make some deletions, some additions and has written a thoughtful new introduction. These essays are still painful to reread, calling to mind things I had forgotten: the four hour buzzer to remind patients to take AZT, the friends who would not drink from the same glass as another, the treatment that Rock Hudson went to France for, the euphemistic use of the word "exposure" rather than saying someone had been exposed to AIDS, Patient Zero. The list goes on and on.

In his introduction Mr. Holleran says that he wrote these essays out of a great feeling of fear and impotence-- when writing fiction seemed useless-- something he captures with awful eloquence in what perhaps is his very best writing. Although he lived in the center of the storm in New York, his experiences were mirrored, sad to say, in every major city in this country during the awful 1980's. His Emmanuels, Eddies and Cosmos et al were my Pierces and Ralphs and Kens and Judds. AIDS in large cities with ACT-UP and support groups and creative funerals was very different than what people experienced in small towns, a dilemma that Abraham Verghesse, a brilliant and most humane physician, captures so poignantly in MY OWN COUNTRY, an account of his experience in caring for people with AIDS in Johnson City, Tennessee in the 1980's. Holleran reminds us that some of us acted badly-- he tells of the man who infected someone he knew but denied that he had AIDS-- but that many of us rose to the occasion and took care of the dying when our government for the most part in those awful Reagan years looked the other way.

By far the best essay in this collection is "Bobby's Grave" which is not about AIDS in New York but about the death, funeral and burial of a friend of Holleran's from Florida, so beautifully written but so sadly familiar.

I am not sure who will read these essays. Many of those who lived through this dreadful time and are still standing probably will not want to revisit the 1980's. Our address books with names crossed out or every time we pass the apartment building that housed people with AIDS where a friend lived and died are sober reminders that our friends are forever gone. On the other hand, nothing captures better than these essays the utter horror of that time. We can only hope that a day will come when the events of CHRONICLE OF A PLAGUE REVISITED will be just a part of ancient history.

Summary of Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath

Andrew Holleran's Ground Zero, first published in 1988 and consisting of 23 Christopher Street essays from the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, was hailed by the Washington Post as "one of the best dispatches from the epidemic's height." Twenty years later, with HIV/AIDS long recognized as a global health challenge, Holleran both reiterates and freshly illuminates the devastation wreaked by AIDS, which has claimed the lives of 450,000 gay men as well as 22 million others. Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited features ten pieces never previously republished outside Christopher Street, as well as a new introduction keenly describing and evaluating a historical moment that still informs and defines today's world-particularly its community of homosexuals, which, arguably, is still recovering from the devastation of AIDS.

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