Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath

by Andrew Holleran

Andrew Holleran's Ground Zero , first published in 1988 and consisting of 23 Christopher Street essays from the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, was hailed by the Washington Post as "one of the best... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786720395
• ISBN13: 9780786720392
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.7" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

THE BEST AUTHOR WRITING ON GAY LIFE

CHRONICLE OF A PLAGUE, REVISITED is a collection of essays that shows how the AIDS epidemic devastated the gay community in New York during the 1980s. A gifted stylist, Holleran's writing is deeply felt, honest, and witty. I not only read this new edition in one sitting, but I went back to my old copy of GROUND ZERO and read the essays that he edited out, including the historically important "The Absence of Anger." When I lived in New York, the one time that I used the New York Public Library's Research Library on Fifth Avenue is when I went to read Holleran's column in the back issues of the now gone magazine CHRISTOPHER STREET. So, I was delighted that he added to this new edition ten of those excellent essays that were not in the original GROUND ZERO. This freshly edited book is more focused and powerful than the original and should be essential reading for any gay man.

Very happy to find this back in print

The majority (but not all) of these essays were initially published as GROUND ZERO, a collection published in the mid-1980s, chronicling the sudden changes in gay life brought about by AIDS (as well as other subjects, such a beautifully lucid essay on Henry James). This is an important book, with essays that are as imagistically rich as they are contemplative, and I'm VERY glad to see it back in print in this new edition!

Andrew Holleran At His Best

When Andrew Holleran burst on the gay literary scene with DANCER FROM THE DANCE we knew we had never read anything quite this wonderful before that was about us. He has consistently written fine novels since that time and continues to fill a needed niche in gay literature, whatever that term means. I have read and own every book he has written, and always looked forward to reading his columns in the gay literary magazine "Christopher Street." Now twenty years after the collection of essays dealing with AIDS was published as GROUND ZERO, he has revisited that volume, make some deletions, some additions and has written a thoughtful new introduction. These essays are still painful to reread, calling to mind things I had forgotten: the four hour buzzer to remind patients to take AZT, the friends who would not drink from the same glass as another, the treatment that Rock Hudson went to France for, the euphemistic use of the word "exposure" rather than saying someone had been exposed to AIDS, Patient Zero. The list goes on and on. In his introduction Mr. Holleran says that he wrote these essays out of a great feeling of fear and impotence-- when writing fiction seemed useless-- something he captures with awful eloquence in what perhaps is his very best writing. Although he lived in the center of the storm in New York, his experiences were mirrored, sad to say, in every major city in this country during the awful 1980's. His Emmanuels, Eddies and Cosmos et al were my Pierces and Ralphs and Kens and Judds. AIDS in large cities with ACT-UP and support groups and creative funerals was very different than what people experienced in small towns, a dilemma that Abraham Verghesse, a brilliant and most humane physician, captures so poignantly in MY OWN COUNTRY, an account of his experience in caring for people with AIDS in Johnson City, Tennessee in the 1980's. Holleran reminds us that some of us acted badly-- he tells of the man who infected someone he knew but denied that he had AIDS-- but that many of us rose to the occasion and took care of the dying when our government for the most part in those awful Reagan years looked the other way. By far the best essay in this collection is "Bobby's Grave" which is not about AIDS in New York but about the death, funeral and burial of a friend of Holleran's from Florida, so beautifully written but so sadly familiar. I am not sure who will read these essays. Many of those who lived through this dreadful time and are still standing probably will not want to revisit the 1980's. Our address books with names crossed out or every time we pass the apartment building that housed people with AIDS where a friend lived and died are sober reminders that our friends are forever gone. On the other hand, nothing captures better than these essays the utter horror of that time. We can only hope that a day will come when the events of CHRONICLE OF A PLAGUE REVISITED will be just a part of ancient history.

Remembering

Holleran, Andrew. "Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited", De Capo Press, 2008. Remembering Amos Lassen It is always an important day for me when a new Andrew Holleran book comes out. Holleran was the author who introduced me to the world of gay literature and last year I finally had the chance to meet him when my reading group invited him to participate in the Arkansas Literary Festival. He is a wonderful writer and a prince of a man. "Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited" is a look back at the AIDS epidemic and what it has done and still is doing to our community. It is a collection of twenty-four essays that appeared in "Christopher Street" magazine during the epidemic. Holleran assesses what we lost and looks at the era and the literature it produced. In "Ground Zero" published in 1988, Holleran published twenty-three essays which he wrote during the early years of the AIDS crisis and had been published in "Christopher Street". When he found out the book was out of print, he decided that we could not, as a community, forget what had been our holocaust. Holleran took the essays and reframed them with a new introduction and issued "Chronicles of a Plague, Revisited". When "Ground Zero" was published it was hailed by many as a review in "The Washington Post" stated, "one of the best dispatches from the epidemic's height". Looking backwards, we learn that AIDS took the lives of almost half a million gay men and twenty-two million others. Can we allow ourselves to forget? Dare we do so? AIDS seems to have become a historical moment in time, an epidemic that defines an age. Many today do know what is was like back then; when we were afraid to read the obituaries in the morning paper because we did not want to see the name of someone we knew. My generation is almost gone and those that are no longer here left this world with lives half finished. They will never be replaced and although we have made great strides of late, they could have been so much greater. We lost so many of our heroes and our leaders, so many beautiful men in the prime of life. We still live in the shadow of the disease that tried to erase us from the world. Andrew Holleran tells us about it and he does not mince his words. I lived through the period and I know he says the truth--eloquently and intellectually and with a gift for using the right words. Many of you did not experience AIDS and some of you have forgotten that it ever was around. The AIDS of today is very different from what was and in a way it is still the same. It decimated us and it brought us together. Holleran says we mist refocus in it. He has chosen to delete the stories from "Ground Zero" that were about sexual freedom and instead we get a more personal look at the effects of the disease and the way it still affects us today. We know that AIDS has changed our lives, our culture, our America. Let Holleran tell you how. Personally, I have a hard time reading about AIDS. I was living in Israel when the epidemic hi