A well-made disco ball of a book — it’s big, discursive, ardent, intellectual and flecked with gossip ... Romano, who worked at The Voice for eight years in its later stages, clearly asked good questions, and she has a snappy sense of conversational rhythm ... The tone of The Freaks Came Out to Write is a symphonic kind of anarchy.
A salacious oral history of the publication that reads like a night at a gossipy media party ... The book re-creates the feel of chatter in a newsroom.
Raucous ... Unfolds like the kind of epic, many-roomed party that invokes the spirit of other parties and their immortal ghosts ... Most chapters offer an inside history of familiar events.
She keeps her narrative moving while sporadically highlighting crucial, but lesser-known figures ... The Voice was the living center of the marginal, the weird, the rebellious. In the space and time of reading this wild ride of a book, I returned to that creative, crazy margin, and I think many other readers will, too.
The collage of interviews in The Freaks Came Out to Write extends from the paper’s idealistic beginnings to its tawdry decline ... A rueful elegy for rawer, cheaper, better days.
Extraordinary ... A triumph of contemporary journalism, a fusion of aesthetic and political positions, a chorus of sound bites from both union and management, unfurling a tale of wild success followed by a slow disintegration.
Scrappy, compendious ... Romano does an impressive job of keeping this Tower of Babel from wobbling too much, preserving the testimonies of a huge host of writers, editors, photographers, staffers, and bystanders sassing and contradicting each other, sharing fond memories while others gnaw on old grudges with beaver gusto.
Wonderful ... A vital, comprehensive piece of media scholarship about one of the most influential outlets of the last century. It’s also fun as hell to read.
Like the Voice itself, The Freaks Came Out can be an unruly, lawless read, suffering the limitations of its strengths. Romano’s oratorio, so dynamic and robust, at times slips into cacophony ... Still, this book is a bona fide treasure chest.
Sometimes history is written to make events seem inevitable, but as Romano’s book powerfully conveys, the Voice was always a real-time argument—occasionally violent—about what the Voice was and should be ... It’s understandable that an oral history devotes attention to longstanding feuds, but there is a nuance that is hard for any one person’s testimony to capture : How does a media enterprise so riven with political and cultural conflict not merely survive but thrive?
An absorbing firsthand history ... An exceptional resource in which readers get a real flavor of the exciting and troubling times throughout the Village Voice’s run and the opportunity to draw their own conclusions about its rise (and fall in 2017).
A phenomenal oral history ... Brimming with riveting anecdotes and capturing its subject’s rollicking spirit, this is a remarkable portrait of the "nation’s first alternative newspaper.
