The Istoriaphile’s Corner

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…