Someone Was Here

An account of the emotional and psychological impact of the AIDS epidemic chronicles the personal tragedies of several AIDS victims, their families, and their friends and offers inspiring portraits of some of the selfless people who work with the dying

For all the tragedy it brings to the lives it touches, AIDS seems to inspire individuals to draw upon personal resources of strength, courage and compassion that might otherwise have gone untapped, as reporter and novelist Whitmore (Nebraska and The Confessions of Danny Slocum) reveals in the three portraits assembled here. Indeed, the fact that Whitmore pursued this project after he was himself diagnosed with Kaposi's Sarcoma (as revealed in the epilogue) is testimony to the exact selfless dedication that he chronicles. What emerges from the profiles is the unquestioning commitment with which a disparate variety of peoplea gay volunteer who spends time with a fellow New Yorker whose illness has left him apartment-bound; a mother who brings her San Francisco street-hustler son back to his small Colorado hometown to die; health workers in a Bronx hospitalshare the blessings of their vitality with those who have been deprived of their own. Whitmore's presentation does not aggrandize their efforts but quietly records the simple sense of duty that compels them to battle adversity in its viral, personal and institutional forms. The book stands as a moving document of human service, an inspiring work as worthy of respect as the remarkable individuals that it commemorates. (April).
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Amidst the political, medical, and statistical aspects of AIDS are the human beings whose lives are being taken. Gay novelist Whitmore, himself diagnosed with AIDS, returns to his journalistic roots to document the tragedy on an intimate level. He presents dramatized profiles based on interviews: Jim Sharp, his lover Dennis, and his buddy Edward in Greenwich Village; Mike Rocha reunited with his mother Nellie in Greeley, Colorado; and Jimmy Sanchez, nursed by Carmen Baez at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx. The result is "something more like snapshots taken from a speeding train" than a panoramic essay. This is an admirable, personal attempt at bringing the abstract horrors of the epidemic to an inescapable reality.James E. Van Buskirk, Acad. of Art Coll. Lib., San Francisco
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.