cover image The Gravest Show on Earth: America in the Age of AIDS

The Gravest Show on Earth: America in the Age of AIDS

Elinor Burkett. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), $24.95 (399pp) ISBN 978-0-395-74537-3

A few pages into this acerbic, compelling and morally acute examination of American responses to the AIDS crisis, Burkett deftly plays raucous gay activist Larry Kramer off against researcher Robert Gallo; their careers, she demonstrates, dramatize the triumph of self-interest over altruism. A journalist formerly working the ``AIDS beat'' at the Miami Herald, Burkett (A Gospel of Shame: Children, Sexual Abuse, and the Catholic Church) contends that this triumph typifies any number of participants in ``AIDS Inc.'' The most devastating health crisis of our age prompted pharmaceutical firms--and the doctors and researchers who worked as their consultants--to practice ``bedside robbery'': charging inflated prices for drugs that have done little to impede and sometimes (as in the case of AZT) have even accelerated the decline in the health of people with AIDS. Sustained examination of the growing suspicion that HIV is not the sole cause of AIDS has been impeded by members of the scientific community who profit from insisting that in fact it is. Burkett does not spare members of the gay community; her chapter ``Strike a Pose,'' aside from an admiring portrait of activist Peter Staley, witheringly characterizes ACT UP's demonstrations as ineffectual theatrics. And the gay community's well-intentioned attempts to address the incidence of AIDS among the black community, she maintains, have been thwarted by ignorance and hostility on both sides. Burkett's take on such familiar topics is bracing and articulate. The book also gives valuable attention to the unfair maligning of the Clinton administration's actions in the fight against the epidemic; to the late Pedro Zamora's ambivalence about becoming MTV's poster boy for people with AIDS; and to the alarming reluctance of the medical community to properly treat and study women infected with HIV. 50,000 first printing; author tour. (Oct.)