Chronicle of a plague, Revisited - AIDS and its aftermath by Andrew Holleran

Paperback book.  2008.  264 pages.  Withdrawn library book.  Front cover of book is imperfect.

One of the most harrowing, essential books ever written about the AIDS epidemic - now completely revisited and revised, twenty years after its original publication.

Andrew Holleran's Ground Zero, first published in 1988 and consisting of 23 essays written during the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, was hailed by the Washington Post as "one of the best dispatches from the epidemic's height."  Twenty years later.  AIDS has claimed the lives of 450 000 gay men as well as 22 million others, and HIV/AIDS remains a global health challenge.  With HIV diagnoses among gay men again climbing, Andrew Holleran, asked to republish Ground Zero, returns with what is, essentially, a new book.

Now both a retrospective consideration of the era and the literature it produced and an assessment of what was lost, and what remains, Chronicle of a Plague.  Revisited assembles twenty-four of Holleran's famed Christopher Street essays, all carefully revisited and framed by an expansive new introduction.  At every moment in this book, Holleran marshals his inimitable talents as an observer, reporter, and writer to simultaneously capture and assess a historical moment that still informs and defines today's world - particularly its community of homosexuals, which, arguably, is still under the shadow of devastation wrought by the arrival of the AIDS epidemic.