One of the great detective stories — a detailed, riveting account of the rise of AIDS. Shilts is a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, himself gay, who was in the midst of the emergency from its very beginnings and established a reputation as the best-informed reporter in the country.
The subject is organizational failure-to-learn on an epic scale, a sort of “War and Peace” of institutional blindness. Everybody knew early about AIDS, and nearly everybody pretended not to know— doctors, gays, media, scientists, the public, government in general and the Reagan administration in particular. In the details of the denial amid the relentlessly emerging horror are shadowy
