For ten weeks David Brudnoy, Boston's most popular and erudite conservative radio-talk-show host, had been off the air. When he signed back on, his faithful following was prepared for the usual dose of wry humor, Clinton bashing, and brilliant banter. What they got instead was an electrifying hourlong monologue, unprecedented in the freewheeling world of talk radio, during which Brudnoy confessed, "I am a fifty-four-year-old homosexual...I was suffering the first attack of HIV - the AIDS virus.".

What followed was an outpouring of support and devotion from an audience not known for its tolerance of gay issues. With his story, Brudnoy has crossed that great abyss where the personal and political meet.

From his near-halcyon youth as an only child growing up in a small Minnesota town to his heady days as a student at Yale, he recounts with equal doses of humor and candor a coming of age that, in fits and starts, eventually recognized a sexual preference for men and a political tendency toward the right.

Ruminating on matters that range from his own mortality to TV, radio, friends, family, romance, and politics, Life Is Not a Rehearsal offers up the kind of trenchant and intelligent insights that are Brudnoy's hallmark.