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Top of the pile
79
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
97/100Critics
60/100Scholars
Author:
Ruth Coker Burks, Kevin Carr O'Leary
Publisher:
Grove Press
Date:
December 1, 2020
The true story of Ruth Coker Burks, a young single mother in Hot Springs, Arkansas, who finds herself driven to the forefront of the AIDS crisis, and becoming a pivotal activist in America's fight against AIDS.
What The Reviewers Say
Throughout the memoir, it’s hard not to fall in love with Burks for her big-heartedness and enduring sense of humor in the face of suffering. However, All the Young Men isn’t an uplifting book. Ignorance, denial and cruelty have always been, and always will be, killers. But as Burks forges a path alongside these vulnerable men, her embrace of education and rejection of bigotry light the way forward for us all..
It’s a tale of high drama and mesmerising detail, but also of breathtaking courage and compassion.
Burks and her co-writer balance tragedy with bright moments of joy, sly humor and inspiring empathy in this surprisingly pleasurable memoir about bridging cultural divides to nurture one another as human beings.
The origin story of the protagonist, dramatic on its own, is mentioned as an aside to the vignettes about the lives of the men she helps. It provides a powerful backstory. Her mother, a former nurse, was placed in a TB sanatorium when she was a child. She didn’t have TB but a rare lung disease. Medical misdiagnosis and mistreatment are part of the family history, and so too is caretaking. The first-person narrative offers the reader moments of shared epiphany.
