Book Review: ALL THE YOUNG MEN by Ruth Coker Burks & Kevin Carr O'Leary

 

All The Young Men

by

Ruth Coker Burks and Kevin Carr O'Leary

In 1986, 26-year old Ruth visits a friend at the hospital when she notices that the door to one of the hospital rooms is painted red. She witnesses nurses drawing straws to see who would tend to the patient inside, all of them reluctant to enter the room. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and immediately begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. Before she can even process what she's done, word spreads in the community that Ruth is the only person willing to help these young men afflicted by AIDS, and is called upon to nurse them. As she forges deep friendships with the men she helps, she works tirelessly to find them housing and jobs, even searching for funeral homes willing to take their bodies - often in the middle of the night. She cooks meals for tens of people out of discarded food found in the dumpsters behind supermarkets, stores rare medications for her most urgent patients, teaches sex-ed to drag queens after hours at secret bars, and becomes a beacon of hope to an otherwise spurned group of ailing gay men on the fringes of a deeply conservative state.

Throughout the years, Ruth defies local pastors and nurses to help the men she cares for: Paul and Billy, Angel, Chip, Todd and Luke. Emboldened by the weight of their collective pain, she fervently advocates for their safety and visibility, ultimately advising Governor Bill Clinton on the national HIV-AIDS crisis.

This deeply moving and elegiac memoir honors the extraordinary life of Ruth Coker Burks and the beloved men who fought valiantly for their lives with AIDS during a most hostile and misinformed time in America.

My Thoughts

ALL THE YOUNG MEN is one of those books that produced so many varied and opposing emotions in me. I cried. I laughed. I was angry. I was in awe of Ruth Coker Burks who single handedly did so much to help an already ostracised group of people that society, and especially their own families, shunned because of their illness.

The story is divided between the lives of the AIDs sufferers Burks helps and her own hardship-filled life that I found just as interesting.

Both stories are set against the 1980s background when the stigma of an HIV or AIDS diagnosis came with prejudice and fear. The story also highlights the hypocrisy of religion and the astonishingly sexist and insincere attitudes prevalent in Arkansas at the time.

The writing flows nicely, and is both candid and emotive. I found the book a great snapshot of a time and place.

Highly recommended!     

Review copy courtesy of Netgalley and Grove Atlantic, Grove Press

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About the Authors

Ruth Coker Burks

Ruth Coker Burks was a young single mom in Hot Springs, Arkansas who cared for people with AIDS when no one else would in the 1980s and 1990s. With no medical background, Ruth single-handedly created a network of care, and saw to the final resting places of roughly a thousand men abandoned by families and neglected by medical professionals. For 30 years, Ruth has been an advocate for the LGBTQ community. She currently resides in Northwest Arkansas.

Kevin Carr O’Leary 

In the summer of 1997, Kevin Carr O’Leary was 21 and a recent graduate of Wesleyan University when he started work at Poz, a landmark magazine about living with HIV. He has since co-written five New York Times non-fiction best sellers, including Strength in Stillness with Transcendental Meditation instructor Bob Roth, This Is Me with actress Chrissy Metz, and Open Book with singer Jessica Simpson. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband and two children.