Parents don’t tell you (even though they should) that it can be hard to grow up with a sister It means there’s there’s always someone else around, and, whether you’re older or younger, you two are always in each other’s shadows. When the two of you are small, sisters are in-house competition for any family attention and favor. And, because a sister gets to know you well, she can figure out every last thing that annoys you. This is knowledge she uses religiously. If someone meets your sister first, they may expect you to be a lot like her. You’re not. In spite of, or maybe because of their physical proximity, sisters can grow up only seeing how they’re different, believing they have nothing in common except relatives and DNA. Ask June Elbus in Tell the Wolves I’m Home how hard it is to have a sister in the house. At one point, Greta seemed like both a sibling and a friend, but now they fight all the time. They can’t help it; they’re such different people. Greta is self-assured, in high school and a gifted actress. June’s still in Junior High and shy. There’s a lot of emotional distance between them and,…
I’ve always been fascinated by disasters. Be they sinking ships, fires or floods, I study the components of first class tragedies, fascinated by the chance occurrences and snap decisions that turn potential trouble into inevitable disaster. Most of the books are about events that happened before I was born and although I find the accounts moving, they rarely infuriate me. I marvel over the human acts of bravery or foolhardiness or the intervention of sheer dumb luck but I see those events from the distance of historic perspective and I know the survivors went on. I didn’t watch those disasters unfold. Perhaps that’s why it took me so many years to pick up Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On, the history of HIV/AIDS in the USA during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Instead of reading about this disaster years after it happened, I watched this disease emerge into the collective consciousness. The prognosis at that time was awful and I purposely avoided the book until advanced treatment gave AIDS sufferers some hope for a decent life. So much has changed in the last 30 years that I thought I could read this at last with detachment. I…