How to Survive a Plague

Summary

An insider history of the AIDS crisis in America and the activist movement — centred on ACT UP and TAG — that forced the medical establishment and government to accelerate the development of the antiretroviral drugs that eventually turned HIV from a death sentence into a manageable condition. France, a journalist who covered the epidemic from its earliest years, draws on his own reporting, thousands of hours of contemporaneous footage, and interviews with survivors to reconstruct a story of both catastrophic loss and extraordinary collective ingenuity. The book is an essential record of how a community faced with indifference and stigma effectively taught itself science and changed the drug-approval system.