And The Band Played On

One of my all time favourite movies was produced and shown by HBO in 1993 and starred Matthew Modine, Alan Alda and Saul Rubinek to name just a few. It was based on the book of the same name, And The Band Played On, which had been written and published by Randy Shilts in 1987. Unfortunately, he was found to be HIV positive in March 1987 and died from AIDS in early 1994. This book is an extremely carefully detailed account of the first five years of the AIDS epidemic and all of its major, and minor, players and their struggle to be heard and taken seriously by the government, press and public at large. At the book’s initial publication, its author was widely regarded as America’s most expert journalist on the AIDS epidemic primarily due to the fact that he had been the only reporter in the world to have worked full-time covering AIDS as the story developed having joined the San Francisco Chronicle in 1982. Thanks to the enlightenment of his employer, he was able to devote himself almost exclusively to reporting on AIDS and it is this reporting that ended up providing the core of his book. The book itself is utterly riveting and is so much more than simply a history of the early years of AIDS. It is beyond majestic. It’s about politics, people, and institutions and their responses of fear, denial and indifference, courage and determination. It is also easily my favourite book of all time. It is also a book that I have just recently finished after having finally located a copy after years and years and some more years of searching for it! Not only did I actually manage to find a used copy in mint condition, the entire cost of the book, plus its shipping and handling from the UK to Canada, cost me less than $8.00 Canadian after calculating the currency exchange. Is that not utterly insane? The second I had located this book, I transferred the required funds from my PayPal account along with all my particulars. Within a week’s time, the book had arrived in my mailbox all safe and sound!

Sony eReader

For as long as I can remember, I have loved to read. I’ll literally read almost anything you put in front of me, and for years I was never without a book within arm’s reach. Of course, reading for pleasure was one of the first casualties once my drug dependence became of paramount importance. Not only did I no longer seem to have the time to read, but the cost of books and magazines suddenly seemed prohibitive to me when there were other, better things to invest in.

Although its taken me a bit longer into my recovery than I had anticipated, I have finally returned to reading with the same zest and obsession of days gone by! One of the things that has really helped me has been the eReader which is is a line of e-book readers manufactured by Sony. It uses an electronic paper display. The reader uses an iTunes store-like interface to purchase books from Sony Connect eBook store. It also can display Adobe PDFs, ePub format, personal documents, blogs, RSS newsfeeds, JPEGs and can play MP3 files. It is so portable and light and it now goes with me everywhere.

Currently, I have about 63 different book titles loaded onto it, although it is able to handle loads and loads more than this amount. Now I can easily juggle reading three separate books at a time, and not have to worry about dragging them all around with me weighing down my purse! I’ve got a variety of subjects loaded on my eReader currently so I’m never bored. There is always one that will pique my interest. The downside, though, has been my recent lack of sleep as I’ve been staying up to all hours reading!

If anyone else happens to have one and if you’re sufficiently interested in the following titles, you are more than welcome to download one or all of the following. The files are all in zip format and once the file has been uncompressed the book is in PDF form. Even if you don’t have an ebook, you can still download any of the files as they can be read directly from your computer. Enjoy…

On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine Nicolas Rasmussen

*a fascinating history of the use and abuse of amphetamines

Bringing the War Home. The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies Jeremy Varon

*about the history of the rise and fall of Germanys Red Army Faction and the Baader Meinhof Gang

The Addict – One Patient, One Doctor, One Year Micheal Stein

*read the New York Times book review

Isn’t it pretty?

The Informers

I’ve just finished watching The Informers. Its a new film written by Bret Easton Ellis based on his book of the same name which was published in 1994. The book is actually a collection of thirteen short stories, and this film has done its best to adapt these stories. It was directed by Gregor Jordan and features an ensemble cast, such as Winona Ryder, Billy Bob Thornton, Mickey Rourke, and Kim Basinger. It also was Brad Renfro’s last film before his untimely death. The film basically covers stories of seven of the film’s characters with these stories  taking place over the course of one week in 1983 Los Angeles. These stories cover the lives of movie executives, rock stars, and other morally challenged characters.

This film was by no means great, in fact, I’m not even sure if it is even good, but for a number of reasons, it ended up kicking me in the stomach.  In an instant, I was transported back to the year that I turned nineteen, 1983! This was to be a seminal year for me and my friends. This was the year that we graduated high school and were about to enter university. Our whole lives were supposedly stretched out in front of us, as in, the world was our oyster. We were invincible, or so we thought.  We dreamed of going off to uni, being away from home and anyone that knew us. We imagined that this would be our time to finally be sexually free, to be able to experiment and to be able to do this without fear of any consequences. How quickly this was all shattered and destroyed.

1983 was also a time when we had first started to hear about some mystery illness that  initially seemed to be randomly killing only gays and IV drug users. A plague of sorts. A plague that was also extremely terrifying especially since the medical community at the time appeared so utterly baffled and helpless. Uncertainty was everywhere. Once the heterosexual population started to show signs of this illness, fears escalated rapidly, as did denial. The medical community had yet to announce how this illness was spreading nor how it could be prevented from spreading.

One thing, though, that we seemed to recognize instinctively, were any thoughts of us finally being able to have indiscriminate sexual encounters would have to end if we were to remain immune. So much for us going off to university with thoughts of anonymous one night stands dancing in  our heads. Didn’t matter any more if we were on the pill as a much larger issue now existed. Not getting pregnant would be the least of our worries. The party really was over, as was our innocence.

This movies touches so many aspects of what me and my friends were going through in our own personal lives twenty six years ago. It seems eerie watching it now, almost voyeuristic. It also almost appears to be a sequel to Ellis’s book/movie Less Than Zero. The book originally was published back in 1985, with the movie of the same name coming out a couple of years later, although there were a lot of changes and departures. What may really end up being interesting will be if Ellis does indeed publish a sequel to Less Than Zero, something he has been promising for a little while now.

P.S. Speaking of the above movie, I just had to go and dig it out to watch yet again. Even though its a bit on the dated side, it still remains one of my favourites from that time period.

GOOGLE’S BOOK SEARCH BETA

A few month’s ago while looking up some information on a particular book, one of the results returned by Google directed me towards their new GOOGLE’S BOOK SEARCH BETA. Ever since I discovered this little gem of Google’s, I have been using it nonstop. If you have a Google user name, you are even able to add titles to your own library. Currently, I’ve got a fair number of titles in my library, and anyone interested can check my books out HERE. You’ll probably notice a bit of a trend regarding my current interests!

 

Once you’ve searched for a title, a number of title links will be presented to you – or you can do a more general topic search with these results returned instead. Depending on the book itself, you’ll be able to access its information by one of three means. You can either get the full preview of the book, a limited preview or a snippet view. The final one returns a page with all of the specifics of the particular book while the other two offer so much more. Even with a limited preview, normally you are able to read substantial portions of the book, generally a few chapters at the very least. If you really want to read the entire book and this is not an available option, there are ways around this though a tad bit time consuming and annoying.

 

Pretty much clearing your browser’s history and cache will allow you to choose otherwise unavailable chapters – restarting your browser after deleting the above mentioned files certainly doesn’t hurt either. Also, if you have multiple browsers installed on your computer then you can usually open them up and read different chapters amongst your various browsers – by different, I mean Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer. If you’ve got one of the many IE based browsers installed, your history/cache for all of these will ultimately be treated as one and the same.

 

One of the recent books that I just finished is entitled Mothers and Illicit Drugs. This book speaks to me on so many levels so I found it particularly helpful. If you go HERE, you can ready some of the book’s more important pages. I’ve created a web page with a number of thumbnails to direct you to these important passages. The page itself is especially easy to navigate.