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Notes -
Started reading And The Band Played On, about the handling of the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the early 80s. Seems interesting so far, and I have at least some expectation of it going against some of the things I believed.
To pre-register what I currently believe, I think it was probably handled within about a standard deviation of about as well as it could reasonably be expected to have been, considering both the highly novel nature of the disease and the behavior of the victims, including being highly reluctant both to seek medical care and to cease high-risk behaviors like sharing needles to inject drugs and highly promiscuous gay sex. I am skeptical that any reluctance of authority figures to take it seriously due to the nature of the victims was a bigger factor than either of those. Considering that even now, ~45 years later, we still don't have a great handle on medical treatment, it's hard to see doing more sooner helping much. The only thing they could have semi-realistically done differently was to crack down much harder on those high-risk behaviors, which probably would have been pretty ugly and would have further outraged the affected community. So yeah, AIDS sucks and hindsight is 20/20, but give us a realistic alternative that the people involved could actually have done if you want to really convince me that we screwed it up.
I'll caveat, as before, that some of Shilts' history is... somewhere between rumor and hearsay. If you read a particularly horrifying quote said by a dead man to an unnamed person in a private conversation, or if there's certainty about the internal state of mind about someone the author never talked with, there's reason to be more skeptical than the prose is.
And The Band Played On doesn't do a lot, imo, to challenge those bounds. For all Shilts puts a lot of blame on Reagan and co, most of it's a complaint for more funding or public announcement, both of which were not very plausible to change without hindsight; most other models run around some early surveillance that the US CDC simply wasn't set up to do in that era. I think there's a steelman available, but it's not generally what people want to talk about.
Thanks, I'll check that thread out after I finish reading.
I did notice that kind of thing, both in this book and the last new non-fiction book I read, The Devil's Chessboard, which I also posted about. They're both non-fiction books that manage to be decently engaging. I think part of the price of that is the authors filling in and making up or embellishing a lot of details about what people said, thought, and were like. On the one hand, it helps draw more casual readers in, but on the other, how could anybody possibly know that for sure? What might a different observer with different opinions think about these people and their situations? You don't get that in this type of book. Maybe it qualifies for being a distinct genre? I'd like to think I'm decent at picking up that theme and not taking the impressions too seriously at least.
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