Sensing Light: A Novel

“A POWERFUL WORK OF FICTION THAT AUTHENTICALLY EVOKES THE BAD AND THE GOOD.”—Eric Goosby, MD, US Global AIDS Coordinator, 2009–13

“A MOVING STORY OF DOCTORS NAVIGATING THE INTERSECTIONS OF SUFFERING, AMBITION AND DISCOVERY.”—Krista Bremer, My Accidental Jihad

This breakout book by Mark A. Jacobson, a leading Bay Area HIV/AIDS physician, follows three people from vastly different backgrounds, who are thrown together by a shared urgency to find out what is killing so many men in the prime of their lives. Kevin, a gay medical resident from working class Boston, has moved to San Francisco in search of acceptance of his sexual identity. Herb, a middle-aged supervising physician at one of the nation’s toughest hospitals, struggles with his own emotional rigidity. And Gwen, a divorced mother raising a teen daughter, is seeking a sense of self and security while endeavoring to complete her medical training. Mark A. Jacobson, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco and attending physician at San Francisco General Hospital, began his internship in 1981, just days after the CDC first reported a mysterious, fatal disease affecting gay men.

Mark A. Jacobson is a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco and an attending physician at San Francisco General Hospital. He began his internship days after the CDC reported a mysterious, fatal form of immunodeficiency in five gay men and soon after was assigned responsibility for critically ill patients with this syndrome.

ISBN: 9781612435701
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
Publisher: Ulysses Press
Published: July 05, 2016

"A powerful and impressive work of fiction that evokes with authenticity the bad and the good for those who were there."—Eric Goosby, MD United States Global AIDS Coordinator, 2009–13

"InSensing Light, Mark Jacobson creates a moving tapestry of the doctors, the patients, and their lovers, both gay and straight, caught up in the AIDS epidemic. A compassionate, intelligent novel, part medical thriller that only someone who was there from the start could've written."—Bill Barich, staff writer forThe New Yorker, 1980–95, and author ofBig Dreams: Into the Heart of California

“The AIDS epidemic emerges at Ground Zero—San Francisco in the 1980s. This riveting drama poignantly captures the raw emotions at the intersection of patients, health professionals, and a society unprepared for a new epidemic.”—Diane Havlir, MD. Chief, UCSF Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital

“Sensing Light by Mark Jacobson, a doctor who worked with early HIV-infected patients and continues to practice medicine today, is a compelling story of the onset of the AIDS epidemic shown through the eyes of three doctors at a San Francisco public hospital. Although historical fiction, the novel reads like a creative non-fiction exploration of the pathos and uncertainty of those early days when gay men were dying and no one could figure out why. The characters are all too human; their battles both internal and external as they attempt to make sense of the horror around them."—Gayle Shanks, co-owner of Changing Hands Bookstore, Phoenix, AZ, and former president of the American Booksellers Association