And the Band Played On:

...While there are a few anecdotes about those who have contracted the disease through blood transfusions or heterosexual sex, virtually no attention is given to another major high-risk group, intravenous drug users...

...I think in the beginning of this whole syndrome, that they, over there, and a lot of other people said, 'Let the faggots die...

...The competition was also a clash of towering egos...

...Gallo . . . worried that the French would be proved right, and he would not get the credit for discovering the AIDS agent," Shilts writes...

...Still, the portraits of the gay victims of AIDS aren't always sympathetic...

...It's also an outstanding piece of reportage, for Shilts painstakingly documents the battles among the AIDS researchers, the complacency of mainstream politicians, and the timidity of gay leaders, all of which contributed to the lethargic pace of development of AIDS prevention and research...

...Gallo and the French scientists were both working in 1983 at isolating the viral agent that caused AIDS...

...VIRGINIA M. BOUVIER is a senior associate of the Washington Office on Latin America and edits the bi-monthly Latin American Update...

...But even so, Shilts has given us a powerful, angry account of the bungling and bickering, the heartbreak and the heartlessness, of the early struggle against AIDS.of the early struggle against AIDS...

...The study showed that in San Francisco, where officials mobilized aggressively and early against the disease, the Chronicle had run sixty-seven front-page stories about AIDS between 1982 and 1985...

...One of the most telling stories in the book is the vicious, running fight between a prizewinning researcher at the National Cancer Institute, Bob Gallo, and the retrovirologists at the Louis Pasteur Institute in Paris...

...But by then, Shilts says, there were nearly 50,000 cases of AIDS in 113 countries...

...Privately, he spread the word that the French isolates were not human viruses at all, but contaminants from other viruses kicking around the labs.'' It was backbiting of the most dangerous sort, the author suggests, for it impeded scientific cooperation at a time it was needed most...

...In laying out the progress of the disease in diary fashion, week by week, month by month, Shilts has found exactly the right format to make his case...

...But as often happens to reporters on specialty beats, he is so consumed by his subject that in the course of a 630-page book, he buries the reader in endless, and often needless, detail...

...Shilts, who is gay, was one of the first reporters in the United States to be assigned to AIDS as a fulltime beat...

...He cites a University of California study that examined the relationship between news coverage and the municipal response to AIDS in two hard-hit cities, San Francisco and New York...

...And the Band Played On is mostly about the impact of AIDS in the gay community...

...Concentrating on the years 1980 to 1985, Shilts's journal-criss-crosses the country, from San Francisco, to New York, where AIDS was spreading fastest, and to Atlanta and Washington, where the researchers and policymakers tried (or failed) to deal with the problem...

...in covering the epidemic...

...Shilts argues that the slow response to the unfolding disaster, principally by the Reagan administration and officials in large cities like New York, allowed the disease to spread widely among gay men and other "high risk" groups, such as intravenous drug users and hemophiliacs...

...The dermatologist's- observation encapsulates the central thesis of Shilts's sprawling book: that the medical and ' political establishments, largely because of homophobia and ignorance, failed- and in some cases, refused-to recognize the early warning signs, as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome developed from a scientific curiosity into a fullblown epidemic...

...in New York City, where much less money was dedicated to AIDS programs, the New York Times had run only seven front-page stories during the same period...

...But even so, he makes a compelling argument for the news media's lack of aggressiveness REVIEWERS DREW CHRISTIANSEN, S.J., is associate professor of social ethics in the department of theology at the University of Notre Dame...

...Was it necessary, for example, to reproduce the press releases of the American Medical Association in their entirety...

...Their social world was under attack by a strange killer that their professional worlds, medicine and politics, were largely ignoring...

...This is going to be a world-class disaster, '' the doctor says to the aide.' 'And nobody's paying attention...

...Peter Marks Back in January 1982 - when a disease that would become synonymous with certain, agonizing death did not yet have a name-a gay dermatologist and a gay political operative met for dinner in San Francisco to discuss a future that few others had dared to imagine...

...What struck the two men on this winter evening, Randy Shilts reports in And the Band Played On, his exhaustive account of the early years of the AIDS epidemic, was their odd predicament...

...But Dugas is a minor player in Shilts's Band...

...And he bitterly reports that journalists did not deem the disease worthy of serious, front-page treatment until 1985, when the world learned Rock Hudson had AIDS...

...In addition, the book sometimes falls into the jargon of "AIDS-Speak" that Shilts says he hates...

...Shilts tends toward the melodramatic - every few pages, it seems, one of his interviewees is breathlessly observing that because of the disease, "The world will never be the same again...

...Unfortunately, the endless repetition of acronyms like HTLV-I and HTLV-II, NIH, NCI, CDC, FDA, GRID, KS, and PCP turns some sections of the book into alphabet soup...

...Shilts also has an irritating habit of congratulating his employer, the Chronicle (by which, of course, he means himself) for repeatedly scooping other newspapers on AIDS-related issues...

...J. M. CAMERON is emeritus professor of English and philosophy at St...

...The doctor saw it in the growing number of young men with Karposi's sarcoma-a skin cancer that normally afflicts elderly Italian and Jewish men-showing up in his examining room...

...In fact, it sometimes seems as if the author had indiscriminately emptied the contents of the reporter's notebooks he has filled over the years...

...Dugas was like an AIDS sociopath: After having sex, Shilts reports, Dugas would point to the purple lesions on his chest, tell his partner that he had "gay cancer" and add that "Maybe you'll get it, too...

...There were, for instance, the doomed dalliances of the so-called "Patient Zero" Gaetan Dugas, a Canadian airline steward who caught the virus early on and spread it to dozens of men that he picked up on his layovers in cities across North America...

...Michael's College, Toronto, and author of On the Idea of a University (University of Toronto Press...

...I wonder if it would have been 1,500 boy scouts, what would have been done...

...He intersperses stories about AIDS sufferers with telling "inside baseball" tales of feuds between cancer researchers in various federal agencies, who were forced to vie for an extremely limited amount of AIDS research money...

...the politico saw it in the increasing ranks of acquaintances dying from a mysterious, wasting ailment...

...The two men already had caught glimpses of the future...

...They're expendable,' " a demonstrator with AIDS tells Shilts outside the White House in 1983...

...The airline steward may have been the Typhoid Mary of AIDS, but Shilts says it was government bureaucrats and scientists, insensitive to the plight of "high risk groups," who succumbed to bias and failed to find out soon enough how to prevent the spread of the disease from one person to another...

...PETER MARKS is a reporter for Newsday...

...Shilts, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter who has covered AIDS since the early 1980s, tracks the history of the disease in a book that is part political journal, part epidemiological diary...