All The Young Men: Compelling portrait of a society riven by fear and bigotry

Ruth Coker Burks’s memoir of her years spent caring for terminally ill Aids patients in the 1980s is a grim but absorbing read

Ruth Coker Burks: her irreverence makes her a truly delightful narrator

MEMOIR

All the Young Men: How One Woman Risked it All to Care For the Dying

By Ruth Coker Burks

Orion Books, €21

In 1986, Ruth Coker Burks was as normal a 26-year-old American woman as you could find, working in a timeshare business in her native Arkansas. While visiting a friend undergoing cancer treatment in hospital one day, she was intrigued to find nurses drawing straws on who might have to enter a room ...