Naga's Ruminations and Reviews

The characters in the story have a depth and are well defined. Ignatius is a character concoction that will remain with me for long. He is both self righteous and naive at his core that makes me sympathetic although he is not portrayed to evoke such an emotion. He is a big fat man who depends on his mother and some menial jobs to survive him(due to his ideals) despite having quality education from college. What circumstances in life must have produced someone as idealistic and rebellious, selfish, self righteous as Ignatius is a wonder. Bad parenting is one word that comes to mind. His mother dotes on him endlessly with no personal life for herself until she has had enough with Ignatius. She gets into a car accident which sets off a series of events into action that are both hilarious and ordained(or so they seem).   I am going with a liberal 4 out of 5 for the plot and the screenplay. I would have liked immensely to have some background into the childhood and early lives of Ig

Rating 3/5  Genre journalism, AIDS epidemic  I wanted to read this book to learn about AIDS. How it has started, what were the events that lead to its discovery and why it doesn't have a cure. Most of what i wanted to learn, which I call useful information, is found in the first 100 and last 100 pages. The rest of the chapters and stories in the 1000+ page book seemed irrelevant that I just skipped them. It was too much information..too many details. I was afraid that I would lose sight of the forest for too many trees. Although it seemed like thorough journalism and the author at the end claimed to have included no fiction in the narrative, the characters are one too many, the story is boringly repetitive.  The author fails to evoke an emotion of injustice and unfairness through conveying the same message over and over again. At the bottom of it, the reason for the unchecked wide spread of AIDS epidemic in the United states between late 1970s to around 1985 is insoucia