SOURCE: A review of And the Band Played On, in The New York Times Book Review, November 8, 1987, p. 9.

In the following mixed review, Geiger lauds Shilts's reportage of various elements of the AIDS epidemic in And The Band Played On, but notes that the study contains an excessive amount of detail, focuses almost entirely on the homosexual population, and lacks information on such individuals as intravenous drug users, who have also been widely infected with HIV and AIDS.

We are now in the seventh year of the AIDS pandemic, the worldwide epidemic nightmarishly linking sex and death and drugs and blood. There is, I believe, much more and much worse to come. But great and lethal epidemics are never merely biological events, and never elicit merely biological or scientific responses. They become social forces in their own right, carving deep new fissures in the political and cultural landscape...