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Joe Sonnabend is one of the first doctors to start researching this new disease, despite virtually no funding and no public awareness.

This willful disregard turns out to be just a small taste of the monumental ways doctors, scientists, researchers, society, and even an American President (Ronald Reagan) would all eventually turn a blind eye. Occasional news reports from France's first years in the City discuss the emergence of this mysterious illness, but, for the most part, the public at large ignores it. The disease first shows up in gay men, and while it would come to impact every facet of the world population-in countries both developed and undeveloped among the rich, poor, and everyone in between-it is thought, in the beginning, that the disease is a "gay cancer." In those early days, the condition is largely concentrated in cities with sizable gay populations, like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Throughout the narrative, he shares his own story, which begins with his arrival in New York City in 1978-right on the cusp of the AIDS crisis. Looking around the room, which swells to some 500 people, most of whom are gay men, France reflects on the work they've done and the ways they've literally changed the world. The book opens with a reunion of ACT UP members in 2013, where the ones fortunate enough to have survived the plague assemble at a memorial service in Manhattan, united all those years ago by their shared experience of death and, now, brought together again by the death of one of their longtime members. Much of the book centers on the efforts of two groups of activists, ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and TAG (the Treatment Action Group). Knopf in 2016, How to Survive a Plague is an expansion of France's 2012 documentary film of the same name, further exploring the stories featured in the film, as well as adding substantial additional material that gives readers a more in-depth look at life and death in the era of a modern plague. American journalist and filmmaker David France’s nonfiction book How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS delves into the history of the AIDS epidemic and the fearless citizen-activists who worked tirelessly to raise awareness about the disease, to advocate for more aggressive medical research, and to bring compassion and attention to the tens of thousands of innocent lives impacted by this illness.