As Real as It Gets: The Life of a Hospital at the Center of the AIDS Epidemic

Encapsulating the AIDS crisis in a profile of San Francisco's General Hospital, recognized globally since 1981 as a pioneer in the research and treatment of the disease, former San Francisco Examiner reporter and columnist Pogash tells an engrossing story through the voices of the hospital's physicians and other health care workers. She captures the excitement of advanced, often highly experimental lab research, including the nation's most extensive drug testing, and she records the financial, political, religious and societal obstacles encountered by the hospital's expanding AIDS program, among them a protracted national debate on the extent of physicians' responsibilities and the best means of safeguarding hospital workers against AIDS. Pogash vigorously marshals facts to support her argument that the disease strikes with little partiality to the sufferer's age, gender, race, social or economic status. Her vivid account of the medical and human dimensions of the AIDS crisis movingly depicts ``the outpouring of love mingled with death.'' (Nov.)