In the 25 years since this book was published, I've read it three times. This is the first time I've felt anything other than outrage, and have been able to notice the writing. Certainly I felt outrage as well this time, along with horror, anger, rage, etc. It's hard not to. The AIDS epidemic, as a public health, scientific, and political issue, was mishandled in every way possible, and there's much we can learn from that morass. Now that we've made some advances in all of those areas, I found it a bit easier to notice the writing, which I'll review here. This is not to minimize the content - if I were focusing on the content the review would read, "This is important. Read it."Shilts is obviously a good writer. He was a reporter for many years, and wrote several books. In this book he took on a lot - it's an immense book, and it must have been extremely challenging to marshal all of the information. As a result, some things were necessarily glossed over. I especially noticed sections where science wasn't fully explained. For example, there are many mentions of retroviruses, and even a good explanation of why there weren't more retrovirologists in the early 80s. But he doesn't really tell us what a retrovirus is.
The other thing I especially noticed is that Shilts goes out of his way to identify everyone in the book, and attributes thoughts and quotes and memos assiduously. But he refers to himself as 'a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle." If one knows that he's the reporter in question, it stands out.
Overall, a very good book, well worth reading, with a few writing quirks which don't detract from the book.
