MixedThe New Yorker[Schulman\'s] book is best approached as a sort of modified oral history, a curated archive of nearly two hundred interviews conducted over the course of two decades. One can open this seven-hundred-page book at random and find something interesting to read: a mini-biography, firsthand recollections of major events, contentious perspectives on the goals of different groups within ACT UP ... Schulman draws, too, on her five years as an ACT UP member, but largely eschews other people’s research, and the book provides scant interstitial narrative; some readers may struggle to put these passages into context. Still, her labors will provide an invaluable resource for the social history of the movement that remains to be written ... of the nearly two hundred interviews that she draws upon for the book, only a few are with Black people. The voices of important activists of color who didn’t survive the plague are absent, owing to her reluctance to use archives other than her own. Even in a chapter describing the plight of H.I.V.-positive Haitians interned in Guantánamo, all her interview subjects are white...Schulman hurries past such conversations, more concerned with scrutinizing the group’s media image than its complicated reality ... ACT UP was always argumentative, though, and Let the Record Show remains faithful to that spirit. If Schulman’s record-keeping sometimes projects her own ideals and aspirations, she never fails to make one truth eloquently clear: \'how brutal debates within the aids community could be, how high the emotional and literal stakes were, how desperate people were, how little anyone else was listening, and how truly destructive the pain and frustration could become.\'
