****Excellent***Good**Ordinary*Poor : Audiocassette Review

**** “And the Band Played On” by Randy Shilts. Read by Willem Dafoe, with an afterword by Shilts. Two cassettes, abridged. Simon & Schuster.

Shilts’ account, based on his articles for the San Francisco Chronicle, is the fullest yet on the identification of the AIDS epidemic (which was a long time even getting a name that scientists could agree on) and of the infuriatingly laggard official steps to cope with it. Part of the foot-dragging, Shilts make clear, stemmed from the fact that the most numerous victims were gay men. The narrative is punctuated by the steeply rising figures on the number of cases and the number of deaths. Willem Dafoe (Christ in “Last Temptation”) gives a reading that is the more urgent for being tersely soft-spoken. The production suggests a well-made radio documentary more than a recital, with musical stings and bridges and a second female voice for factual inserts. Author Shilts himself updates the text in an afterword, which suggests that the Reagan Administration has continued to drag its feet even as the crisis deepens and governments elsewhere are mobilizing all their resources. A frightening document and an important use of the audiocassette as an informational device.