And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts
Published 1987 · 173,250 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Journalism & Reportage, History, Politics & Society
How hard is And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic to read?
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic scores 50 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 50 out of 100
- Medical and political vocabulary, glossed.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Short newspaper sentences.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Concrete reporting with a strong causal argument.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- Hundreds of named people across a decade — the density is in the cast.
How And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic is regarded
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic holds a literary regard score of 70 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.
Where the story of And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic takes place
- United States, 1980s AIDS crisis (1980 to 1985), the main setting