Top 10 Books of 2009

Here are my Top 10 books from 2009.

2009 is just about in the books, as it were, so it’s time for my second annual look back at the past year’s reading and decision about my Top 10 books.

All in all, it was a solid reading year.  My total number of books dropped somewhat from last year’s record total of 154 books, and that in part can be explained by my blogging regularly rather than simply writing the book’s title and author down on a cumulative list.

I have a perennial desire to stretch and read more literary classics in 2010, and here, in chronological order of when I read them, are my favorite books of 2009.  I am including the link to the post I wrote about each work.

As always, commentary, disagreement and other people’s list are welcome!

1. The River of Doubt, by Candice Millard.  This spellbinding tale of Teddy Roosevelt’s last great travel adventure to map the Amazon had me riveted from the beginning.

2. Brothers and Keepers, by John Edgar Wideman.  The award-winning author uncorks a potent tale of murder, choices and their consequences, and the bone-deep bonds of brotherhood in this impressive work.

3. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes.  This Pulitzer Prize-winning tome breaks down the science of nuclear physics and intertwines that information with a compelling account of the scientists who created the atomic bomb and the times in which they worked.

4. Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without a Number, by Jacobo Timerman.  Timerman’s account of life in a prison cell during the period the generals ruled in Argentina is at once erudite and searingly honest.

5. Hunting Eichmann, by Neal Bascomb.  Bascomb’s story of how an elite crew of Israeli Defense Force men, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, tracked down and captured one of the genocide’s major architects makes for thrilling reading.

6. And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts.  Shilts died far too young from the disease that he chronicled so ably.  This pioneering work shows the rise of the epidemic and the Reagan Administration’s callous indifference to it.

7. Rules for Radicals, by Saul Alinsky.  The late organizer would have turned 100 this year, but his legacy endures.  This primer distills the wisdom he gained during his notable organizing career, starting with the most basic rule: Deal with the world as it is, not as it should be.

8. The Power of Full Engagement, by Jim Schwartz and Tony Loehr.  This work is on the list because of the utility of its ideas, rather than the quality of its writing.  Schwartz and Loehr argue that managing energy, not time, is a key toward full engagement in life’s activities.

9. The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel.  Washington Post editor Finkel spent the better part of a year with an elite unit of Rangers during the surge former President Bush authorized to thwart the Iraqi counterinsurgency.  This remarkable book is the result.

10. O Jerusalem, by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre.  This fascinating account of Israel’s initial months as a country is a swashbuckling affair that should be required reading for people planning to visit the country.

The beginning of the AIDS Epidemic: Randy Shilts’ And The Band Played On

Randy Shilts' account of the beginning of the AIDS epidemic is a jarring and haunting read.

Reading some books is like feeling a cool breeze wash over you on a sun-dappled beach as waves gently lap nearby.

The whole effect is soothing, restorative, healing.

But then there are other books which grab you with an urgency the way your mother’s voice called you by your full name when you were in trouble.  Forcing you to read them, these books and their unsettling contents stay with you far after the reading ends, churning and knocking you off-balance.

The late Randy Shilts’ And The Band Played On is an example of the latter type.

Shilts’ account of the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, the Reagan administration’s callous indifference to the deaths of gay men, the medical community’s internecine competition, and the gay community’s failure to grasp the magnitude of what was happening and alter their sexual behavior accordingly alternately chills, haunts and inspires.

It’s been more than 20 years since the book was first published, and, unfortunately, the disease has spread beyond what then seemed almost unimaginable proportions.

Shilts breaks the work into quick chapters into he weaves a near dizzying array of characters through the 600-page work.

Some of the book’s more memorable people include Gaetan Dugas, a handsome and extremely promiscuous French-Canadian flight attendant who for years was considered by some researchers to be “Patient Zero” of the epidemic, the cantankerous and combative Larry Kramer, noble congressional aide and AIDS activist Bill Kraus, and Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler, whose personal understanding of the disease’s possible impact is not matched by a forceful push for funding.

The book veers from Africa, when a Danish researcher appears to catch and die from the virus, to the United States to France, where a frenzied quest to discover the virus is wage, and back.  At times, And The Band Played On reads like a series of dispatches issued from all over the globe and linked by all being tied to the ever growing epidemic. 

The constantly growing number of people infected with, and dieing from, the virus is a metronome-like presence in the book that can leave the reader numb at the rapidly increasing and spreading toll.

While Shilts focuses directly on governmental inaction, the book is not an anti-government screed.  Rather he discusses directly the bathhouse scene in San Francisco in which emotional connection was absent amid intense physical intimacy.   San Francisco Public Health Director Mervyn Silverman’s halting decision to shut the houses and the visceral reaction it elicited point to a community that did not fully accept or deal with the implications of what was happening. 

Medical researchers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean seem more concerned with personal glory than with collaborating to stop the disease, while keepers of the nation’s donated blood supply do not bathe themselves in honor, either.  The mainstream press fares poorly, too. 

In short, a host of people and institutions failed the gay community and the people in it, and the disease has spread rapidly from being considered a gay white man’s disease to in fact being more common among people of color, many of whom are women.

Shilts quotes liberally  at the beginning of sections from Albert Camus’ The Plague, which was conceived and written in part in the small French Huguenot mountain village of Le Chambon Sur Lignon. 

More than two decades after And The Band Played On, it is unclear whether Camus’ assessment that plagues are not eradicated, but merely subdued, is correct.    But it is abundantly clear that Shilts’ book is a powerful marker in the sand, reminding us of the  ruinous consequences of policy paths not taken.