Description: Sensing Light is a vivid evocation of the most dramatic period in the history of AIDS. A novel of scientific discovery and compassion, this book tells the story of three physicians whose paths intersect in 1979 when a patient with inexplicable, life-threatening pneumonia is admitted to the hospital.
Brief description: Mark A. Jacobson is a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco and an attending physician at San Francisco General Hospital. He began his internship days after the CDC reported a mysterious, fatal form of immunodeficiency in five gay men and soon after was assigned responsibility for critically ill patients with this syndrome.
Review Quotes: "A powerful and impressive work of fiction that evokes with authenticity the bad and the good for those who were there." --Eric Goosby, MD United States Global AIDS Coordinator, 2009-13
"In Sensing Light, Mark Jacobson creates a moving tapestry of the doctors, the patients, and their lovers, both gay and straight, caught up in the AIDS epidemic. A compassionate, intelligent novel, part medical thriller that only someone who was there from the start could've written." --Bill Barich, staff writer for The New Yorker, 1980-95, and author of Big Dreams: Into the Heart of California "The AIDS epidemic emerges at Ground Zero--San Francisco in the 1980s. This riveting drama poignantly captures the raw emotions at the intersection of patients, health professionals, and a society unprepared for a new epidemic." --Diane Havlir, MD. Chief, UCSF Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital "Sensing Light by Mark Jacobson, a doctor who worked with early HIV-infected patients and continues to practice medicine today, is a compelling story of the onset of the AIDS epidemic shown through the eyes of three doctors at a San Francisco public hospital. Although historical fiction, the novel reads like a creative non-fiction exploration of the pathos and uncertainty of those early days when gay men were dying and no one could figure out why. The characters are all too human; their battles both internal and external as they attempt to make sense of the horror around them." --Gayle Shanks, co-owner of Changing Hands Bookstore, Phoenix, AZ, and former president of the American Booksellers Association