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AIDS Booklist

Fiction

• Sacrament
  Author: Barker, Clive
  Publisher: HarperCollins $ 25 ISBN: 006017949x Date: 1996
  Kirkus
  Barker's most mainstream book to date: a contemporary human drama laced with the popular author's extraordinary visions. Will Swift has everything. Handsome, famous, revered, he is the world's greatest wildlife photographer, known for capturing the beauty, terror and tragedy of nature. Yet deep inside, Will is a haunted man. In a coma after he is mauled by a rogue polar bear, Will remembers and relives the seminal event of his childhood: an encounter with ancient and evil forces who showed him the mystery at the heart of nature.
  Updated 11.9.05
• Ravelstein
  Author: Bellow, Saul
  Publisher: Viking $ 22.50 ISBN: 067084134x Date: 2000
  Kirkus PW Booklist Library Journal
  When Abe Ravelstein, a brilliant professor, suggests that his friend write a memoir or life of him, the two share a celebratory trip to Paris where they explore thoughts on mortality, philosophy, history, old suits, and friends old and new. The mood of this journey turns more somber once they have returned to the Midwest and Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS in this elegy to friendship and lives well (or badly) lived.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
• What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day
  Author: Cleage, Pearl
  Publisher: Avon $ 20 ISBN: 038097584x Date: 1997
  Kirkus
  After more than a decade of living the high life, Ava Johnson returns to the sleepy little community in Northern Michigan where she grew up. But what Ava perceives as an end is only the beginning, because there is too much happening in her small hometown to ignore. A highly readable fiction debut in the tradition of Terry McMillan and Connie Briscoe.
  Updated 11.9.05
• Veronica
  Author: Gaitskill, Mary
  Publisher: Pantheon $ 23 ISBN: 0375421459 Date: 2005
  Kirkus PW Booklist LJ
  The long-awaited novel from the acclaimed author of Bad Behavior is a dark fairy tale set in Paris and Manhattan in the 1980s--a story about beauty, narcissism and appetite, transience, aging and mortality.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 10.24.05
• Traveling Light
  Author: Kittle, Katrina
  Publisher: Warner $ 18.95 ISBN: 04465248085 Date: 2000
  Booklist
  A dancer-turned-school teacher encounters a string of bad luck in the form of a career-ending injury and the slow death of her brother but slowly to come to terms with life and relationships and discovers how fortunate she really is.
  Updated 4/17/00.
• Above the Thunder
  Author: Manfredi, Renee
  Publisher: MacAdam $ 24 ISBN: 1931561591 Date: 2004
  PW
  Above the Thunder tells the story of three generations of women and the men with whom their lives often unexpectedly converge.
  Updated 1.5.04
• Women in the Grove
  Author: Peterson, Paula W.
  Publisher: Beacon $ 22 ISBN: 08077083256 Date: 2004
  Kirkus LJ
  Paula Peterson"s memoir, Penitent, with Roses, was an unflinching account of her life as a woman and mother after being diagnosed as HIV positive. All the stories in Women in the Grove feature women living with HIV infection. Shot through with humor, warmth, and insight, Peterson succeeds in bringing us to a radically new understanding of life with AIDS. - Publisher Marketing.
  Updated 2.2.04
• Dorian
  Author: Self, Will
  Publisher: Grove $ 24 ISBN: 0802117295 Date: 2003
  Library Journal
  The New York Times Book Review has praised Will Self as a "high-powered satirical weapon." Set against the AIDS epidemic of the 80s, Self's Dorian is a shameless reworking of a most significant myth of shamelessness, brilliantly evoking the decade in which it was fine to stare into the abyss.
  Updated 11.20.02
• In the City of Shy Hunters
  Author: Spanbauer, Tom
  Publisher: Grove $ 26 ISBN: 0802116914 Date: 2001
  Booklist
  When William Parker moves from Jackson Hole to Manhattan in 1983, he becomes wrapped up in one of the most unforgettable romances in recent literature: a love affair with a volatile, six-foot-five African-American drag queen named Rose.
  Updated 6/20/01
• Married Man: A Love Story
  Author: White, Edmund
  Publisher: Knopf $ 25 ISBN: 03754000052 Date: 2000
  Kirkus Library Journal Booklist
  Pushing 50, an American furniture scholar in Paris has an affair with a young and married French architect. In a desperate quest for health and happiness, they travel from Venice to Key West to Montreal to Providence. Finally, in the Sahara, their love is pushed to the ultimate crisis.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 5/19/00.

Nonfiction

• Days of Grace: A Memoir
  Author: Ashe, Arthur & Arnold Rampersad
  Publisher: Random $ 24 ISBN: 0679423966 Date: 1993
  Booklist
  An inspiring memoir by the late Arthur Ashe--tennis champion, social activist, AIDS victim, man of courage and grace. Ashe tells about the athlete's life; tennis court contemporaries such as Connors, McEnroe, and Navratilova; his passionate devotion to his wife and daughter; the places he has been; people he has known; and more.
  Updated 11.14.05
• This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death
  Author: Brodky, Harold
  Publisher: Holt $ 20 ISBN: 0805048316 Date: 1996
  Kirkus PW
  In The Wild Darkness, Brodkey, who died of AIDS on January 26, 1996, examines his his passage from the ranks of the living to the fraternity of the dying with the same irony and lucidity he brought to his association with his acclaimed fiction. Part journal, part memoir, part essay, this book offers a frank and profound exploration of Brodkey's sexuality, his relationships, and the slow, withering advance of his disease.
  Updated 11.9.05
• The Gravest Show on Earth: America in the Age of AIDS
  Author: Burkett, Elinor
  Publisher: Houghton $ 24.95 ISBN: 0395745373 Date: 1995
  Booklist LJ PW
  Not since And the Band Played On has any journalist taken readers behind the scenes in the war against AIDS to reveal how avarice, ignorance, and egotism are subverting the nation's struggle against the epidemic. This hard-hitting expose takes no sides. Burkett trains the same critical eye on scientists and activists, on Jesse Helms and gay America, to create a compelling, investigative tour de force.
  Updated 11.14.05
• Three on the Edge: The Stories of Ordinary American Families in Search of a Medical Miracle
  Author: Kelly, John
  Publisher: Bantam $ 24.95 ISBN: 0553101137 Date: 1999
  LJ
  Nearly 200,000 people in the United States are currently participating in clinical trials. John Kelly's compelling medical documentary follows three patients who have staked their lives on experimental treatments.
  Updated 11.1.05
• The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping
  Author: Nasdijj
  Publisher: Ballantine $ 22.95 ISBN: 0345453891 Date: 2003
  Booklist LJ PW
  When the author decided to adopt a ten-year-old Navajo boy named Awee, who was born with AIDS and endured a difficult and abusive childhood, Nasdijj, Awee, and the Awee's dog, Navajo, formed a new, tightly knit family. Nasdijj reveals his untraditional family was filled with love but also with great pain.
  Updated 11.14.05
• And the Band Played On
  Author: Shilts, Randy
  Publisher: St Martins $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312009941 Date: 1987
  Randy Shilts, the nation's most prominent AIDS reporter, answers questions in a provocative behind-the-scenes account of the first five years of the AIDS epidemic. He uncovers the reasons why the epidemic was allowed to spread so thoroughly before it was taken seriously.
  Updated 11.14.05
• First Comes Love
  Author: Winik, Marion
  Publisher: Pantheon $ 23 ISBN: 0679445722 Date: 1996
  Booklist Kirkus
  When NPR commentator Marion Winik met Tony Heubach at Mardi Gras in 1983, there was "a spark of recognition between us. . . . something with a trajectory outside my field of vision". In this candid and deeply felt memoir, she traces that trajectory: a straight woman and a gay man falling in love, marrying, raising two beautiful sons; their against-the-odds happiness eventually crumbling under the pressure of AIDS; and the harrowing, heartbreaking final moments of their life together.
  Updated 11.14.05
• We Are All the Same: The Story of a Boy's Courage and a Mother's Love
  Author: Wooten, Jim
  Publisher: Penguin $ 19.95 ISBN: 1594200289 Date: 2004
  PW Kirkus
  We Are All the Same is a powerful testament to the strength of the human spirit, even as it bears witness to the scope of the tragedy that is unfolding in Africa and around the world, cutting down millions of children like Nkosi Johnson.
  Suggested Reading: South Africa
  Updated 9.6.04