Starting June 2015, I'm going to list one book that either had a great impact on me, or I just thoroughly enjoyed.
This month's book, And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts was the first book that took me out of my safe, self-involved, the government is my friend, zone. Each chapter I grew more and more angry
and more and more sad as countless lives were ruined due to fear, bigotry and downright hate. It was this book that made me realize that love is love, in all its forms and shouldn't be confiled by what
may or may not dangle between the legs. Read this during my college years and knew then I could never trust the government to look out for the well-being of people ... that is, unless you were male, straight,
white, and rich. They just didn't care about HIV/AIDS until it effected one of their own, and even then, research and money moved at a snail's pace. And it wasn't just the government; scientists themselves
bickered and bitched their way through the virus-hunting process, where, even to this day, French and US scientists cannot come to an agreement about who discovered what and when.
If you've seen the movie, it covers a lot of the book, but you don't get the whole story, and how can you in a two and half hour movie when compared to a 656-page novel. If it's been a while, I suggest reading
the book again.
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