AIDS and the Bubonic Plague

MAGAZINE AND ENCYCLOPEDIA ARTICLES About AIDS and the Bubonic Plague

Health Source: Consumer Edition, MasterFILE Premier, and Middle Search Plus Databases (Ask a library staff member for the User ID and Password you'll need to log in to these databases.)
http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?authtype=uid

Student Resource Center
(Ask a library staff member for the Library ID you'll need to log in to this collection.)
http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itweb/cms

AIDS Information Sources

AIDS: from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS

The Truth About HIV and AIDS
http://library.thinkquest.org/J003087F/

AIDS, Sex and Teens (from Avert.org)
http://www.avert.org/young.htm

AIDS.org
http://www.aids.org/

HIV/AIDS
http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/

AIDSinfo
http://www.aidsinfo.nih.gov/

AIDS Partnership Michigan: Frequently Asked Questions
http://www.aidspartnership.org/faqs.shtml

What is AIDS? - HIV symptoms - AIDS symtoms - symptoms early HIV infection - early signs infection
http://www.globalchange.com/ttaa/ttaa%203.htm

BUBONIC PLAGUE Information Sources

Bubonic Plague: from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubonic_plague

The Black Death: Ron Wild examines the worldwide devastation of
populations caused by the bubonic plague.
http://www.history-magazine.com/black.html

Black Death, by By Dr Mike Ibeji
(from BBC: Society and Culture)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/society_culture/welfare/black_01.shtml

Eyewitness to History: The Black Death, 1348
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/plague.htm

History of Epidemics and Plagues
http://uhavax.hartford.edu/bugl/histepi.htm#plague

The Black Death: Bubonic Plague World History
http://www.william-shakespeare.info/bubonic-black-plague-world-history.htm

FROM THE FICTION SHELF

The Heaven Shop, by Deborah Ellis (author of The Breadwinner)
Booklist Review: Gr. 5-8. Like Allan Stratton's Chanda's Secrets [BKL Jl 04], but for a younger audience, this is a poignant story of a child caught up in the AIDS crisis in southern Africa. Binti, 13, lives in a city in Malawi, attends a private church school, and stars in a weekly radio show. Her mother is dead, and then her father dies. No one talks about why until her tough grandmother, Gogo, announces that they died of AIDS. Binti is taken in by cruel relatives, her sister becomes a prostitute, and her brother lands in prison, but they finally reunite with Gogo in a poor rural community. The plot is contrived, and Binti speaks like a Western child at times. But Ellis, who has written about children in crisis in Afghanistan, Israel, and Palestine, and visited Malawi, creates a vivid sense of the place and characters that are angry, kind, brave, and real. The facts about AIDS--the statistics, denial, discrimination, and ignorance--drive the story. Proceeds from book sales go to UNICEF.
-- Hazel Rochman (BookList, 09-01-2004, p120)

Chanda's Secrets, by Allan Stratton
School Library Journal Review: /* Starred Review */ Gr 8 Up–Chanda, 16, remembers the good times, when she lived with both parents on a cattle post in sub-Saharan Africa and even later on when her family moved to Bonang. Her family's troubles began after her father was killed in the diamond mines. Her first stepfather abused her; the second died of a stroke; the third is a drunken philanderer. Although Chanda lives in a world in which illness and death have become commonplace, it is not one in which AIDS can be mentioned. The horror and desperation of families facing this disease is brought home when her latest stepfather's sister dumps the dying man in front of their shantytown house. Before Chanda can get help from the hospital caseworker, he disappears and the wagon that brought him is burned. Her mother leaves to visit her family on the cattle post and Chanda is forced to give up her dream of further education to care for her younger sister and brother. Slowly she comes to realize that her mother has AIDS, and that she might be infected herself. But Chanda's education serves her well as she faces the disease head-on. In a sad but satisfying ending, she rescues her mother so that she can die at home and she and her siblings get themselves tested. Smart and determined, Chanda is a character whom readers come to care for and believe in, in spite of her almost impossible situation. The details of sub-Saharan African life are convincing and smoothly woven into this moving story of poverty and courage, but the real insight for readers will be the appalling treatment of the AIDS victims. Strong language and frank description are appropriate to the subject matter.–Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC (Reviewed July 1, 2004) (School Library Journal, vol 50, issue 7, p131)

The Beat Goes On, by Adele Minchin
Fifteen-year-old Leyla, a shy musician, has always looked up to her gorgeous and confident cousin, sixteen-year-old Emma, but when Emma learns she's HIV positive after having unprotected sex just once, everything changes.

The Cure, by Sonia Levitin
A sixteen-year-old boy living in 2407 collides with the past when he finds himself in Strasbourg in 1348 confronting the anti-Semitism that sweeps through Europe during the Black Plague.

Breath, by Donna Jo Napoli
Elaborates on the tale of "The Pied Piper," told from the point of view of a boy who is too ill to keep up when a piper spirits away the healthy children of a plague-ridden town after being cheated out of full payment for ridding Hameln of rats.

King of Shadows, by Susan Cooper
From Library Journal
Grade 5-8-Orphan Nat Field is chosen as part of an American theater group to perform at the new Globe Theatre in London. Nat's big role will be Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. However, his debut is pushed 400 years into the past when he is put to bed with a high fever and wakes up in Elizabethan England. Forced to adapt or be discovered, Nat figures out his situation quickly with judicious questions that result in naturally occurring explanations of the times, the plays, and the theater. The time-travel element is well constructed. Through occasional flashes to the present, readers learn that a boy presumed to be Nat is being treated for bubonic plague. Nat Field has switched places with the infected Nathan Field, who is just about to arrive at the old Globe on loan from another company-thus, thanks to modern medicine, Shakespeare and his plays are saved for the ages. Something in the boy attracts the attention of Will himself and Nat soon becomes his prot?g?. The father/son relationship between the two fills a need for Nat, whose suppressed sorrow at his father's suicide after his mother's death is finally expressed. The circumstances of his father's death and Nat's reluctance to deal with it are hinted at rather clumsily in the beginning of the book and dispatched succinctly when finally addressed, and come off as clearly secondary to the involving theater experiences. Still, Cooper's readers and fans of Gary Blackwood's Shakespeare Stealer (Dutton, 1998) will revel in the hurly-burly of rehearsals and the performance before the queen, the near discoveries, the company rivalries, and some neatly drawn parallels.
Sally Margolis, Barton Public Library, VT
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

NONFICTION WORKS

It Happened to Nancy, by an anonymous teenager ; edited by Beatrice Sparks
In diary format, this is the story of 14-year-old Nancy who was raped by her boyfriend & infected with the HIV virus. The editor of the classic GO ASK ALICE has compiled the poignant journals of a 14-year-old date-rape victim who contracted AIDS and died.