cover image Angels in Our Midst

Angels in Our Midst

Mary Fisher. Moyer Bell, $24.95 (160pp) ISBN 978-1-55921-218-2

At the 1992 Republican National Convention, Mary Fisher, a former White House staffer in the Ford administration and an HIV-positive Republican mother, came into the public eye. Since then, she has written a memoir (My Name Is Mary) and two collections of speeches (Sleep with the Angels and I'll Not Go Quietly). Here, she changes her medium and her focus, using camera as well as text to describe the lives of people caring for the dying. Traveling around the country, she portrays social workers, hospice workers, family, friends, religious figures--in short, the whole gamut of volunteers. Along with the 90 photos and the text on both individuals and programs, there are sidebars of letters written to Fisher or of excerpts from her own speeches. She's a missionary, and her tone is inevitably earnest (""For all these changes, one thing has not changed: the caregiver. He still rises in the night to care for someone he loves. She still drives through a snowstorm to calm someone she adores. They push the giggling child higher in the swing""). Fisher's pictures are affecting but like the text rather one-sided, showing caregivers hugging, listening to, playing with AIDS patients of all ages. But it's the grittier stuff--the bathing, tracking drugs and special diets, or endless paperwork--that makes these people so admirable. (Dec.)