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

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.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

There is nothing more thrilling than a good journalist with her dander up. Reporting on AIDS and, of necessity, running with the many (often well-intentioned) rascals of AIDS science and politics have really roused Burkett. Her deposition on those rascals and a few real samaritans comes in 12 reports on various aspects of what one chapter title aptly calls "AIDS, Inc." --that is, the business of making a living off the disease. First in her rogues' gallery are two supreme egoists, self-aggrandizing retrovirologist Robert Gallo and second-rate author turned AIDS-harpy Larry Kramer. From these petty demons she turns to turf-protecting virus and drug researchers, marketers to the "AIDS community," race and sex discriminators among AIDS activists, the strange case of "The Immaculate Transmission" of HIV to a supposed virgin by her dentist, MTV's exploitation of AIDS patient Pedro Zamora, profiteering drug companies, the politicians both pro-and antigay who obstruct the public health response to AIDS, and the attention-grabbing but mostly ineffectual protesters of ACT-UP. Burkett's indignation flares from every page, but she rarely lets it distract her from making sound cases against her villains and for her heroes. Making those cases, she forcefully demonstrates that the common sense to treat AIDS as a disease has seldom gotten a chance to be heard, much less acted upon. There are three essential books on AIDS' cultural impact: Shilts' And the Band Played On (rev., 1993), Fumento's Myth of Heterosexual AIDS (rev., 1993), and this book. Ray Olson