Recent Reading: Let the Record Show

 

Last night, I finished Sarah Schulman's book Let the Record Show:A political history of Act Up New York, 1987-1993. I am glad I read the book, but at more than 700 pages (thank-God for ebooks which are much easier on the wrists) and 27 hours in audiobook version, the book should have been 25 percent shorter.

In addition, Schulman has written something of an oral history, but the book is not organized like most oral history books I have read. For example...

Studs Terkel's book Working -- which I read twenty years ago in the original, not graphic novel version, and still think about -- is, in my mind, the gold standard for oral histories. Even though it is more than 600 pages long, it is a quick read. The book is a series of transcripts where people talk, as the subtitle says about what they do and what they think about what they do all day. Each interview is self contained and can be read in any order.

 

Another oral history book that I have dipped into but have not read cover to cover is Tinderbox: HBO's Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers by James Andrew Miller. The book is long -- more than 900 pages -- but it is easy to skip chapters you are not interested in and just read the chapters you want to read. The way Schulman has organized her book makes skipping chapters nearly impossible.

This is not to say that Let the Record Show is a hot mess. It is a both worth reading. I learned quite a bit about what people in Act Up thought about Larry Kramer and the New York Times (hated) and how it took some time for the community to recognize that AIDS is not solely a problem confined to gay white men in New York City.

While AIDS remains a huge problem in the United States and elsewhere, excellent treatments are available for those with good health coverage options.

To close this brief review, consider how different the situation was in 1985 in Greenwich Village.

In New York in 1985, he observed that "when you got off at Christopher Street ... you saw AIDS the minute you got off the train. Those were the days when men with wasting syndrome were walking up and down the street, all over the place; when you saw people with large KS {Karposi's Sarcoma) lesions, and everything; when you saw places draped in mourning, and everything else. It was really inescapable."