Book Post 2

Synopsis

All the Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks is a first-person memoir from a young single mother who found herself as one of the only allies to the men afflicted by the AIDS Crisis in 1980s Arkansas.  In 1986, Ruth was helping care for her friend in the hospital who was suffering from tongue cancer and heard distant cries of pain. She followed them to our door marked "biohazard" but entered anyway. There she found a young man who was on the brink of death, alone and suffering. She offered him the compassion and humanity that the rest of society had been denying him. After he passed away, the Hot Springs, Arkansas community began to identify her as the only person willing to help those afflicted by AIDS. She began to help care for them -- finding them housing, work, food, healthcare, and eventually places to be buried. Throughout the book, Ruth develops unbreakable friendships with the men she meets. All the Young Men is a story about the compassion that can be found in despair. It's a story of how Ruth Coker Burks defied society's approach to the AIDS Crisis to help a misunderstood community and became an activist in America's fight against AIDS. 

Takeaways

It was really striking to me how much society ostracized not only those affected by AIDS but those who helped them during the AIDS Crisis. Ruther Coker Burks was entirely shunned by most of her community after she began to offer really simple necessities of life to the sick. She tried to offer them food and shelter and her community abandoned her. For example, she would bring food to church potlucks and it would go untouched. And this was near the beginning of the memoir, before she had become as engrossed in her work as she did. Once she began to gather really visible public attention for her work, it escalated. People went as far as to burn crosses on her lawn -- even though most would think showing an afflicted community compassion would be acting as Jesus would. She risked everything to help a marginalize group of people. She knew she could lose custody of her daughter, the friendship and community of those she knew, and her reputation. Still, in a very uplifting and admirable way, she did everything she could to help them. From the perspective of the patients, I knew that the AIDS Crisis resulted in a lot of misinformation but I never realized the full extent of the results, especially in a conservative place like Arkansas. Hospitals wouldn't care for those sick with it. I assumed this was an obligation of the hospital. Cemeteries wouldn't take the bodies. In one scene, Ruth's friend Billy calls her and tells her he stabbed his boyfriend -- which was not true -- but when the police arrived, they refused to enter the building because Billy had AIDS. I had understood the AIDS Crisis as a time when an afflicted people were treated wrongly by the communities they were originally parts of. I didn't realize the ways in which they were denied the basic rights and necessities of life. All the Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks gives powerful and emotional insight into what it was actually like to be involved in the AIDS Crises.

Impressions

I thought Ruth Coker Burks told her story in an remarkably narrative way that people don't usually associate with the first person memoir/autobiography genre. Due to the incredibly high-stakes circumstances that she became involved in, her story is new and captivating to most readers. She took some very bleak and empty settings and was able to create a balanced tone that allowed the reader to not become too disheartened. There are countless scenes with deathbed or funeral settings that she's able to make less depressing with her own personal thoughts, feelings, memories, and connections with the men that she knew. There are also some events that she spins entirely -- at Chip's funeral, Ruth calls it a "screw you" funeral, where Chip "drew back that bow and aimed that arrow straight into the heart of anyone who hadn't loved him enough" (Coker Burks 206). I thought this was a really powerful idea and showed that these men weren't as hopeless as they were sometimes made out to be. If anything, they still had a presence to leave behind. These men were still people; they could be strong, defiant, and important.  All the Young Men is a deeply moving story about the compassion that one woman showed to those who were offered none. It's about the community and solidarity that her and her daughter develop with these people. It's about the love that can still be found in the darkest of circumstances.