SOURCE: Marks, Jim. “In the Country of Grief.” Washington Post Book World (7 April 1996): 11-12.

In the following review, Marks praises Heaven's Coast, asserting that the book is a powerful work of reminiscence in the canon of AIDS memoirs.

Inadvertently, and quite unwillingly, I've become a connoisseur of AIDS memorials. The most beautiful was a recent concert given by a choral society for one of its members. But I left the service angry and depressed because neither the word “AIDS” nor my friend's lover of over five years appeared in the four-page biographical program. Beauty, I concluded, was no substitute for honesty and integrity.

Unique among AIDS memoirs, Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast raises the question of whether beauty, even when coupled with honesty, is an appropriate response to the continuing tragedy of AIDS. Books like Paul Monette's Borrowed Time and David Feinberg's Queer and Loathing are too conscious of...