by Susan M. Reverby
University of North Carolina Press
6/8/2020, hardcover
SKU: 9781469656250
Alan Berkman (1945-2009) was no campus radical in the mid-1960s; he was a promising Ivy League student, football player, Eagle Scout, and fraternity president. But when he was a medical student and doctor, his politics began to change, and soon he was providing covert care to members of revolutionary groups like the Weather Underground and becoming increasingly radicalized by his experiences at the Wounded Knee takeover, at the Attica Prison uprising, and at health clinics for the poor. When the government went after him, he went underground and participated in bombings of government buildings. He was eventually captured and served eight years in some of America's worst penitentiaries, barely surviving two rounds of cancer. After his release in 1992, he returned to medical practice and became an HIV/AIDS physician, teacher, and global health activist. In the final years of his life, he successfully worked to change U.S. policy, making AIDS treatment more widely available in the global south and saving millions of lives around the world.
Using Berkman's unfinished prison memoir, FBI records, letters, and hundreds of interviews, Susan M. Reverby sheds fascinating light on questions of political violence and revolutionary zeal in her account of Berkman's extraordinary transformation from doctor to co-conspirator for justice.
Reviews:
Riveting. Alan Berkman and Barbara Zeller saw themselves revolutionaries in the early 1970s. Then came Berkman's carceral inferno followed by public health redemption. A tale masterfully told by a superb historian with a primary experience of these people and times.--Alfredo Morabia, Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Public Health
From suburbia and the Ivy League to the radical underground and the global fight against AIDS, Alan Berkman lived a fascinating life. With erudition and clarity, Susan Reverby recounts Berkman's many astonishing encounters: with revolutionaries and the police, with prison, and with cancer. This excellent biography of the revolutionary doctor provides a unique glimpse into the last half century of American radicalism.--Dan Berger, author of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era
About the Author:
Susan M. Reverby is the Marion Butler McLean Professor Emerita in the History of Ideas and Professor Emerita of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy.