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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Annelie Geissler
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Politics & government

LET THE RECORD SHOW

Sarah Schulman

A Political History of ACT UP, New York. 1987-1993

Twenty years in the making, Sarah Schulman's monumental LET THE RECORD SHOW is the most comprehensive political history ever assembled of ACT UP and the American AIDS crisis.

In just six years, ACT UP, New York, a broad and unlikely coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds, changed the world. Armed with rancor, desperation, intelligence, and creativity, ACT UP, NY took on the AIDS crisis with an infatigable, ingenious, and multifaceted attack on the corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals who stood in the way of AIDS treatment for all. They stormed the FDA and NIH in Washington DC and started Needle Exchange in New York; they took over Grand Central terminal and fought to change the legal definition of AIDS to include women; they transformed the American insurance industry, weaponized art and advertising to push their agenda, and battled--and beat--the New York Times, the Catholic Church, and the pharmaceutical industry. AIDS Activism in its complex and intersectional power, transformed the lives of People With AIDS and the bigoted society that abandoned them. Based on more than 200 interviews with ACT UP members and rich with lessons for today's activists, LET THE RECORD SHOW is a revelatory exploration - and long overdue reassessment - of the coalition's inner-workings, conflicts, achievements, and ultimate fracture. Schulman, one of the most revered queer writers and thinkers of her generation, explores the how and the why, examining, with her characteristic rigor and bite, how a group of desperate outcasts changed America forever, and in the process created a livable future for generations of people across the world. Sarah Schulman is the author of novels, nonfiction books, plays and movies. Her recent works are Maggie Terry, The Cosmopolitans, which was picked as one of the "Best Books of 2016" by Publishers Weekly, and a nonfiction book, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair. Previous novels are The Child, Shimmer, Empathy, Rat Bohemia, People in Trouble, After Delores, Girls Visions and Everything, The Mere Future, and The Sophie Horowitz Story. Her nonfiction titles are Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia And Its Consequences, The Gentrification Of The Mind: Witness To A Lost Imagination, Stagestruck: Theater, Aids And The Marketing Of Gay America, Israel/Palestine and The Queer International, and My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During The Reagan/Bush Years.

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Book Published 2021-05-18 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Comments

Characteristically forthright, Sarah Schulman gives us the most comprehensive history of the ACT UP movement in New York to date through a wide range of interviews, a trenchant commentary, and a sustained testament to collaborative action and its history... This work also tells us why so many people become activists: to understand social and political forces that seem overwhelming, to work with others to give order to their world, and to find community in suffering, anger, analysis, and action.

These portraits, together with the historical context offered throughout, prove the lasting influence of ACT UP and have a lot to teach readers about activism today...This engaging, accessible book will find a wide audience among readers interested in activism from the ground up. It will also be a foundational document for historians for generations to come. A must-read.

Sarah Schulman has written more than an authoritative history of ACT UP NY here - it is a masterpiece of historical research and intellectual analysis that creates many windows into both a vanished world and the one that emerged from it, the one we live in now... Any reader will be changed, I think, by the stories here - radicalized and renewed, which to me is something better than just hope.

Sarah Schulman's remarkable book LET THE RECORD SHOW offers a thorough and corrective retelling of the history of ACT-UP, introducing a diverse cast of characters that has been largely erased from what passes as the official HIV/AIDS narrative. She brings extraordinary reporting, finely calibrated detail and her own lived experience to a book that is at once a love letter to the movement that refused to back down as it forced an epidemic to its knees and a road map for a new generation of activists grappling with social change.

Her approach to the material is at once unsentimental and resolutely personal.

Sarah Schulman has achieved the near impossible in this riveting and powerful book... The writing is crisp and compassionate. The stories are vivid - heroic, painful, breathtaking and joyous. Sarah Schulman has produced a definitive and monumental work.

[Schulman's] work has taught me how to have a point of view, how to have a radical political analysis that is matter-of-fact, and how to make big arguments that are specific in scope... Schulman gives us a framework for cultural and political change outside of consolidated corporate cultural and political power.

Schulman approaches her political history with a novelist's understanding of the complexities of character, action, and consequence... Let the Record Show preserves the spirit of ACT UP's single statement of unity and purpose... [Schulman] is one of our most formidable contemporary intellectuals and an essential recorder of queer and activist histories.

Monumental... Schulman doesn't replace one set of heroes with another; rather, she destroys the idea of singular heroes at all. This is a political choice that creates a more honest representation of ACT UP... The most salient thread we can draw from Let the Record Show is an understanding of how mass movements can succeed and fail, all at the same time, depending on which part of the 'mass' you're in.

An in-depth and fully realized account... a text that offers younger queer activists a rare study of their own history.

A masterpiece tome: part sociology, part oral history, part memoir, part call to arms... Medical inequity continues not only with Covid but also with H.I.V./AIDS still, and it will repeat until we manage to learn from the past - about survival, and about the fight. Here is a primer, a compendium of what one group learned and struggled with and accomplished. Here is a book to start a mighty shelf.

We owe a great deal to Schulman for the depth and years of her research, for her commitment to telling a story that lifts and honors a group rather than highlighting only a few individuals, and for her willingness to tell the whole truth with serious rigor and love.

A necessarily expansive and bombastic corrective of modern history... Let the Record Show is as righteous and revelatory as its subject matter.

The book is a monumental achievement, the culmination of decades of work, and almost unbelievable in its scope and scale. Its construction is also a lesson in community storytelling; from long profiles of former members and extended transcripts of their interviews, to detailed insights into the day-to-day workings of the group, Let the Record Show honors the humanity of those involved to an extent that no other history of AIDS has achieved.

LET THE RECORD SHOW is One of O, the Oprah Magazine's 32 LGBTQ Books That Will Change the Literary Landscape in 2021, one of Vogue's 9 LGBTQ+ Books We're Looking Forward to This Spring, one of and Cosmopolitan's LGBTQ+ Books to Add to Your Reading List in 2021, one of The Observer's Spring Books You Don't Want to Miss, and one of Bloomberg's 14 Books to Put on Your Reading List This Spring

Remarkable... In the pages that follow, Schulman does more than establish an extensive history of the movement, she guides us through the transferable principles that made it successful and encourages us to let this history do real work as we strategize interventions in response to the countless crises of our world.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. "This is not reverent, definitive history. This is a tactician's bible."

Sarah Schulman's LET THE RECORD SHOW is a finalist for the John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, which is "for a distinguished book of general nonfiction possessing notable literary merit and critical perspective that illuminates important contemporary issues." And in addition, LET THE RECORD SHOW is a nominee for the Gotham Book Prize!

Let the Record Show is a corrective intervention in AIDS historiography, attempting to revise the popular understanding of ACT UP to make it both more democratic and more accurate... [Let the Record Show] paints a picture of activists not as martyrs, but as real people, living out the full spectrums of their emotional lives while also trying to meet the demands of history.

A significant boots-on-the-ground account... Readers are right there with activists, hearing their stories from them but also others who knew them... Vital, democratic truth-telling.

his is not reverent, definitive history. This is a tactician's bible.

Schulman paints an honest portrait of the complexities of coalitional politics, adding nuance and depth to an often-flattened period of history. The result is both an engrossing tribute to the past and a crucial handbook for activists who hope to leave their own lasting mark on the future.

From the human perspective, it's simply satisfying to consume Schulman's fulsome demonstration that ACT UP was not the work of heroic straights or the clean-cut and mostly white men whose names are now synonymous with the group, such as Larry Kramer, but in fact always relied on the many people of color, incarcerated people, women, and drug users who devoted their labor . . . this work of adapted oral history is a mixture of creative froth and leaden grief... Gradually, Schulman corrects a view on history that's been distorted by the profit motive.

Finalist for the 2022 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the 2022 Gotham Book Prize for Best New York City-Based Book Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize Shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award

A stunning achievement... The expanse and generosity given in Let the Record Show - the integrity of giving people a platform to tell their own story and to showing the messiness and complexity of the truth - reflects the commitment not only of Schulman but of the hundreds of people in the ACT UP movement.

A resounding rebuttal to exclusionary versions of AIDS history... Not merely a matter of representation, Schulman's recontextualization serves as an intervention in the political analysis of ACT UP.

LET THE RECORD SHOW is more than a single book; it's an encyclopedia, an oral history, and a map... It is a masterpiece - the book on AIDS history I wish had been available for me to read years ago.

[A] fine-grained history... [Schulman's] firsthand perspective and copious details provide a valuable testament to the courage and dedication of many unheralded activists.