RaveLambda Literary... even though Let the Record Show is somewhere close to 800 pages, you’ll read it urgently. The fight for the public’s attention still feels alive in the way Schulman writes. This is a book that looks backwards and forwards at once ... Schulman does her best to highlight this, to pick at the ways we only understand movements through heroes and leading individuals. Let the Record Show acquaints the reader with this instinct. Reading through the memories and impacts of the survivors interviewed for the ACT UP Oral History Project and referred to in this book, I found myself clinging to each name, thinking this person, this one was especially memorable ... I love knowing this, that in the midst of all the loss and illness, attraction and pleasure and relationships were also integral, were also deeply explored and expanded ... the inciting question Schulman set out to answer when beginning the interviews that would become the basis for this book: What did the members of ACT UP share? Finding the link between such a diverse group was maze-like and riddled with deadends. The answer Schulman comes to is motivating though; it makes me ask what we’re all doing now.
Anne Boyer
RaveLambda LiteraryShe faces the topic of cancer head on. And in doing so, she made me realize that what I thought I knew about the disease was really just a reflection of it ... Boyer is interested in documenting the realities of suffering the way a critic might document the events of a movie ... There’s an urgency to the writing in this book that keeps delicacy out. It changes the framework we give to sickness. There is no pre- and post-disease when one person’s diagnosis bleeds into another’s and another’s ... Often the short sections end with discouraging details left hanging without observation. It’s like the writer is opening doors, letting our reactions sit in the silence of hers ... Even if analysis of these details is sometimes left to just the facts themselves, The Undying achieves unflinching directness.
