EIGHTY-SIXED <i> by David Feinberg (Penguin: $7.95)</i> : REPORTS FROM THE HOLOCAUST The Making of an AIDS Activist <i> by Larry Kramer (St. Martin’s Press: $10.95) </i>

Two very different accounts of the battle against the pandemic in New York City.

B. J., the central character of David Feinberg’s darkly funny first novel, thrives on the neurotic, promiscuous life he leads at the fringes of Manhattan’s chic gay circuit during the early ‘80s: a continual round of work, work-outs, sex and kvetching. This urban idyll darkens with the onset of AIDS. As he watches a friend gradually succumb to the disease, B. J. finds maturity thrust upon him; he learns to become a care-giver by observing the way his mother acts with his increasingly senile grandmother. Raunchy and sardonic but ultimately life affirming, “Eighty-sixed” is a curiously affecting contemporary coming-of-age story.

Larry Kramer may be the angriest man in America. In this collection of editorials and speeches, he presents a scathing diatribe against what is and isn’t being done to arrest the progress of the disease. Kramer fulminates like an Old Testament prophet against the ignorance, prejudice, indifference, bureaucratic inertia and ineptitude that have condemned thousands to death. In weak moments, he bores the reader, nattering at friends who disagree with his ideas or tactics, like the Madwoman of Chaillot chiding “the Adolphe Berteaux of the world” for abandoning her. But the accusations that Kramer makes about the mismanagement of the AIDS crisis are based on facts, not mad fantasies.

Visitors to Provence still can see the walls people built in the Middle Ages to block the “plague winds” they believed carried the contagion from Italy. Some day, Kramer’s book may be reduced to a curiosity, like those crumbling monuments to fearful ignorance, but that day is very far away.