AS REAL AS IT GETS: The Life...

AS REAL AS IT GETS: The Life of a Hospital at the Center of the AIDS Epidemic by Carol Pogash (Plume: $9.95; 255 pp.). In 1981, the staff of San Francisco General Hospital found themselves at one epicenter of a nascent epidemic. As the numbers grew, these men and women learned how to care for AIDS patients and provide comfort, despite the bitter frustration of not being able to cure them. Pogash offers a series of moving portraits from the trenches of this battle, including a broad spectrum of patients (gay men, heterosexual women, IV drug-users), dedicated doctors, researchers and nurses committed to the care of others, and a surgeon who treated her Hippocratic Oath like an overcoat--something to be cast off when it became inconvenient.