God Doesn't Make Trash
Significantly, the number of books dealing primarily with AIDS is down compared to 2000 . AIDS is now more likely to be treated as an incidental fact, not a focus. Indeed, scanning the titles and descriptions of the books listed in the article, I counted only eight titles that spoke of AIDS specifically. There appears to be little interest anymore in the personal stories of those lost. Indeed, it takes the stature of an Edmund White to even interest a major publisher in another collection of cenotaphs. What then do we make of Barbara Rose Brooker¹s brave little book recounting the stories of friends and acquaintances long dead from AIDS? The book¹s title comes from a conversation Brooker had with former Marlboro Man and later AIDS model, Christian Haren. Brooker, a struggling novelist with two young daughters had been a reluctant but loving witness to her next door neighbor¹s early agonizing victimization and discrimination preceeding his death from the virus and its complications. In an effort to fulfill a promise to her friend, Brooker sets about taping interviews with AIDS patients in a half-hearted attempt to document their stories. Christian Haren was her first interviewee.
Galvanized by anger and illness, co-opted by the nascent AIDS response movement as a poster child, Haren is in a unique position to usher Brooker to the Castro and San Francisco General Hospital¹s earliest AIDS ward in the rapidly blackening early days of the pandemic. Constantly, Haren pushes her to listen, to record, to write. Alternately cajoling and hectoring, the dying Haren manages to inspire the straight, Jewish, liberal Brooker to undertake a project which was to haunt her for the following fifteen years. The product of that haunting, some twenty-nine chapters profiling men and women, gay and straight in the grips of a time and a disease, is really as much a portrait of middle class America¹s dawning awareness of and helpless witness to the pandemic as it is of the dying¹s. The dying themselves are vibrantly recalled in Brooker¹s tender, elegaic chronicalling, but it is the portrait of Brooker herself that is most compelling. Her journey from sympathetic bystander to paralyzed witness to stoic promise-keeper is a genuine document of a time and a place that seems, unfortunately, to have an expired shelf-life.
Abpout the Author
Barbara Rose Brooker has an MA in English Literature and Creative Writing and has for several years taught creative writing at San Francisco State University's Extended Education as well as nationally in public and private seminars. In 1988 William Morrow published her novel So Long, Princess. In 1989, the author's poetry was featured, along with Maya Angelou and other Pulitzer award-winning poets in the anthology She Rises Like The Sun, published by Crossing Press, and her most recent poems are in an anthology published by Mangrove Press. From 1991-1993 she wrote a column "Buy The Bay" for the San Francisco Independent newspaper. Her column, "Suddenly, Sixty," appearing in the San Francisco Marina Times, is in the process of publication. She has published with local and national magazines, and in October,1999, she was featured on the lead story in Entertainment Tonight.
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Galvanized by anger and illness, co-opted by the nascent AIDS response movement as a poster child, Haren is in a unique position to usher Brooker to the Castro and San Francisco General Hospital¹s earliest AIDS ward in the rapidly blackening early days of the pandemic. Constantly, Haren pushes her to listen, to record, to write. Alternately cajoling and hectoring, the dying Haren manages to inspire the straight, Jewish, liberal Brooker to undertake a project which was to haunt her for the following fifteen years. The product of that haunting, some twenty-nine chapters profiling men and women, gay and straight in the grips of a time and a disease, is really as much a portrait of middle class America¹s dawning awareness of and helpless witness to the pandemic as it is of the dying¹s. The dying themselves are vibrantly recalled in Brooker¹s tender, elegaic chronicalling, but it is the portrait of Brooker herself that is most compelling. Her journey from sympathetic bystander to paralyzed witness to stoic promise-keeper is a genuine document of a time and a place that seems, unfortunately, to have an expired shelf-life.
Abpout the Author
Barbara Rose Brooker has an MA in English Literature and Creative Writing and has for several years taught creative writing at San Francisco State University's Extended Education as well as nationally in public and private seminars. In 1988 William Morrow published her novel So Long, Princess. In 1989, the author's poetry was featured, along with Maya Angelou and other Pulitzer award-winning poets in the anthology She Rises Like The Sun, published by Crossing Press, and her most recent poems are in an anthology published by Mangrove Press. From 1991-1993 she wrote a column "Buy The Bay" for the San Francisco Independent newspaper. Her column, "Suddenly, Sixty," appearing in the San Francisco Marina Times, is in the process of publication. She has published with local and national magazines, and in October,1999, she was featured on the lead story in Entertainment Tonight.
God Doesn't Make Trash
Significantly, the number of books dealing primarily with AIDS is down compared to 2000 . AIDS is now more likely to be treated as an incidental fact, not a focus. Indeed, scanning the titles and descriptions of the books listed in the article, I counted only eight titles that spoke of AIDS specifically. There appears to be little interest anymore in the personal stories of those lost. Indeed, it takes the stature of an Edmund White to even interest a major publisher in another collection of cenotaphs. What then do we make of Barbara Rose Brooker¹s brave little book recounting the stories of friends and acquaintances long dead from AIDS? The book¹s title comes from a conversation Brooker had with former Marlboro Man and later AIDS model, Christian Haren. Brooker, a struggling novelist with two young daughters had been a reluctant but loving witness to her next door neighbor¹s early agonizing victimization and discrimination preceeding his death from the virus and its complications. In an effort to fulfill a promise to her friend, Brooker sets about taping interviews with AIDS patients in a half-hearted attempt to document their stories. Christian Haren was her first interviewee.
Galvanized by anger and illness, co-opted by the nascent AIDS response movement as a poster child, Haren is in a unique position to usher Brooker to the Castro and San Francisco General Hospital¹s earliest AIDS ward in the rapidly blackening early days of the pandemic. Constantly, Haren pushes her to listen, to record, to write. Alternately cajoling and hectoring, the dying Haren manages to inspire the straight, Jewish, liberal Brooker to undertake a project which was to haunt her for the following fifteen years. The product of that haunting, some twenty-nine chapters profiling men and women, gay and straight in the grips of a time and a disease, is really as much a portrait of middle class America¹s dawning awareness of and helpless witness to the pandemic as it is of the dying¹s. The dying themselves are vibrantly recalled in Brooker¹s tender, elegaic chronicalling, but it is the portrait of Brooker herself that is most compelling. Her journey from sympathetic bystander to paralyzed witness to stoic promise-keeper is a genuine document of a time and a place that seems, unfortunately, to have an expired shelf-life.
Abpout the Author
Barbara Rose Brooker has an MA in English Literature and Creative Writing and has for several years taught creative writing at San Francisco State University's Extended Education as well as nationally in public and private seminars. In 1988 William Morrow published her novel So Long, Princess. In 1989, the author's poetry was featured, along with Maya Angelou and other Pulitzer award-winning poets in the anthology She Rises Like The Sun, published by Crossing Press, and her most recent poems are in an anthology published by Mangrove Press. From 1991-1993 she wrote a column "Buy The Bay" for the San Francisco Independent newspaper. Her column, "Suddenly, Sixty," appearing in the San Francisco Marina Times, is in the process of publication. She has published with local and national magazines, and in October,1999, she was featured on the lead story in Entertainment Tonight.
Galvanized by anger and illness, co-opted by the nascent AIDS response movement as a poster child, Haren is in a unique position to usher Brooker to the Castro and San Francisco General Hospital¹s earliest AIDS ward in the rapidly blackening early days of the pandemic. Constantly, Haren pushes her to listen, to record, to write. Alternately cajoling and hectoring, the dying Haren manages to inspire the straight, Jewish, liberal Brooker to undertake a project which was to haunt her for the following fifteen years. The product of that haunting, some twenty-nine chapters profiling men and women, gay and straight in the grips of a time and a disease, is really as much a portrait of middle class America¹s dawning awareness of and helpless witness to the pandemic as it is of the dying¹s. The dying themselves are vibrantly recalled in Brooker¹s tender, elegaic chronicalling, but it is the portrait of Brooker herself that is most compelling. Her journey from sympathetic bystander to paralyzed witness to stoic promise-keeper is a genuine document of a time and a place that seems, unfortunately, to have an expired shelf-life.
Abpout the Author
Barbara Rose Brooker has an MA in English Literature and Creative Writing and has for several years taught creative writing at San Francisco State University's Extended Education as well as nationally in public and private seminars. In 1988 William Morrow published her novel So Long, Princess. In 1989, the author's poetry was featured, along with Maya Angelou and other Pulitzer award-winning poets in the anthology She Rises Like The Sun, published by Crossing Press, and her most recent poems are in an anthology published by Mangrove Press. From 1991-1993 she wrote a column "Buy The Bay" for the San Francisco Independent newspaper. Her column, "Suddenly, Sixty," appearing in the San Francisco Marina Times, is in the process of publication. She has published with local and national magazines, and in October,1999, she was featured on the lead story in Entertainment Tonight.
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God Doesn't Make Trash
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God Doesn't Make Trash
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780738848259 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Xlibris Corporation |
| Publication date: | 03/21/2001 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.52(w) x 8.38(h) x 0.56(d) |
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