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huddycleve's review against another edition
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
5.0
hopebrasfield's review against another edition
5.0
I had been wanting to learn more about ACT UP, so when this book was recommended to me by a friend I pretty much rushed to get started. It’s long! It’s detailed! I learned so much that I’m not even sure where to begin!
A comprehensive review of this book (including everything I learned, was shocked by, or that otherwise inspired me) would be well beyond the scope of my capacity for book review writing in general — so instead, I’ll just say this: if you’re involved with any sort of activism or organizing work (or interested in potentially getting involved with that work at some point in the future), you should consider taking the time to read through this book if at all possible. The work of ACT UP is often invoked in situations where the invoker* knows full well the invokee** won’t know whether or not what they’re saying is true. “We should do xyz, and organize it in abc way, just like ACT UP!” Should we? Did they? How are you supposed to know if you don’t know that history? And if it is true, what if that’s just one portion of that history, one particular member’s experience? This is touched on in the preface:
“A number [of the members interviewed] were surprised that I didn’t know in advance of our conversation about events they had organized, whey they experienced as central to the organization. Yet they often did not understand what others were doing at the very same moment.”
This is key to the book itself, with Schulman weaving together many interviews across many themes, actions, internal debates, etc., in an attempt to present a fuller, more nuanced picture of the group than what has been available in the past.
I’m excited to have had the chance to read this, and will be revisiting it again and again (I’m sure)!
*Is that a word?
**Perhaps I’ve made these words up, I’m not sure; you know perfectly well what I mean, though!
elenushka8's review
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death
historyofjess's review
challenging
informative
slow-paced
4.0
This was a really intense document of a very emotional period in queer history and I'm really glad to have read it. That being said, I didn't always love the way the book was laid out and presented. Some of this definitely has to do with the audiobook, which was not separated into clear chapters, but rather a bunch of tracks that cut across the different books/chapters and the narrator. While she had a pleasant voice, I found her reading to often be hard to follow. So much of this book is quotations that are written the way people speak, and she would just run through them, without giving a good separation between the narrative pieces of the book and the quotations. Her reading was also just a little herky jerky at time, particularly with the natural speech elements, but there were also several moments where she would pause in the middle of a sentence or a compound word, it was very distracting. I found the the author-read opening and closing bits to be much better, especially since she was reading about her own experiences.
rachbake's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
5.0
Brilliant, useful, inspiring, heartbreaking, infuriating.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Terminal illness, Excrement, Medical content, and Grief
archytas's review against another edition
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.25
This is a bit of "glorious mess" of a book. Shulman is committed to telling an activist history of ACTUP NYC that doesn't reduce the story to the perspectives of a few. Rather, she draws on the hundreds of oral histories carried out with ACTUP members to tell stories from dozens of perspectives. Central to Shulman's concern is to highlight the women, latinx and Black activists within ACTUP. She puts a strong argument that the organisation's biggest successes came from the work of this group. This was only slightly undermined by the fact that, in their oral histories, many of these activists revealed that they saw themselves as fringe within the group, which they saw as dominated by white men, many of them somewhat wealthy.
It was hard not to think of Alexis Wright's incredible Tracker in reading this, but which also utilises oral histories to tell a story that defies a single perspective. This isn't a fair comparison, as Wright is a novelist and Tracker is a carefully constructed story. Shulman, however, was working to deconstruct the idea of a single narrative with mixed success, but in ways that were always compelling. I completely tore through this lengthy book, wanting to follow the stories. Shulman herself, however, also argues for her views, colouring the book. One the one hand, I admired that she was not pretending to an impossible objectivity. However, there are times when she directly disagrees with a quote, where it can feel like the stories needed some more time to breathe. (also times, such as in covering the cathedral action, where critical views felt minimised in comparison to public comments by the participants. Shulman's pride in ACTUP doesn't prevent her from critique, but it does lend of course to focusing on successes. At times, I felt the absence of a discussion of the contribution made by other organisations in other places to some of the policy gains.
On the whole, though, this does a magnificent job of telling stories which have had little airing. And in celebrating the successes of NY ACTUP in fighting for needle exchange, enabling women to be diagnosed (yes, incredibly AIDS was defined by a series of opportunistic infections uncommon in women and none of those - like yeast infections - which were, leading to women dying without officially having the disease (or getting access to disability)). In New York, AIDS was prolific in injecting drug user communities as well as the gay community, and Shulman captures how the movement spread to jails, and to refugee services for poz Haitians stranded by authorities. Shulman stays respectful of all the participants, her narrative coloured by a weary grief that extends tenderness even with anger amid the battles. This is the kind of messy history we need much more of, which refuses to collapse the heat and passion of change to singular stories and perspectives.
mossyforest's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.0
breadandmushrooms's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0