A Crisis of Meaning: How Gay Men Are Making Sense of AIDS

AIDS has established itself as our century's great health tragedy, and more information on it is always welcome, but this book contributes little to the current debate. The misstatements begin with its subtitle: it is based on interviews with 19 HIV-positive men done in 1990-1991 and thus in no way represents what gay men think today about the illness, which has evolved much in recent years. The subjects chosen by Harvard psychology professor Schwartzberg were furthermore limited in that they were asymptomatic. These outdated interviews might have retained some interest if presented in full, in Studs Terkel fashion. Instead the author chooses to scatter bits throughout the book to support his own conclusions. Schwartzberg makes the rather banal claim that ""Reading this book is apt not to be a dispassionate experience."" Nor was the author able to distance himself. While he declares that he himself is gay, the interview segments show him also to be quite judgmental: he is ""outraged"" because one man is depressed; he accuses another fatalistic interviewee of embracing ""powerlessness."" Oddest of all, he accuses another man, who simply answers his questions, of being ""exhibitionistic."" The author himself admits he did ""not respond with enough sensitivity"" in certain interviews, and the reader can only agree wholeheartedly. There is still a place for a major book of interviews with AIDS patients to supplement those already on bookshelves, but the present book, which lists Freud, Jung and Norman Cousins in the bibliography, is not that book. (Nov.)