THE COMPASSION PROTOCOL by Hervé Guibert

George Braziller, 1994, First American edition, 199 pp., 5 3/4" X 8 1/2", Hardcover

Near fine

"I have the feeling I've created a work both barbarous and delicate," Guibert says of this searingly beautiful chronicle of his final days fighting AIDS. Brutal, joyous, and tender, the journal recounts torturous tests, periods of agonizing pain and despair, the ecstasy of staring down death by daring to live, and redemption through writing. Guibert takes us along on a trip to the brink of hopelessness that eventuates in the transcendence of the human spirit. On the way, he chronicles his plummeting weight and T-cell count and his desperate attempts to secure DDI, which provides remission from his symptoms, and he muses, "My father had wanted me to do medicine." This is an almost unbelievably moving and grueling book, not for the faint of heart or stomach but immeasurably heartening, arguably destined to become a classic that extends the reaches of AIDS literature.