The effect is rather like standing in the middle of that large room, where anyone could speak up and share an idea. Everyone is talking; small stories branch off, coalesce pages later. Speakers shade in one another’s stories, offer another angle, disagree passionately. You turn a page, and the same people have their arms linked together at a protest. Shadows start to fall; in squares of gray text, deaths are marked, moments for remembrance. So many people leave the room.

... a masterpiece tome: part sociology, part oral history, part memoir, part call to arms.

... outstanding.

... remarkable.

... the remarkable, timely capstone to [Schulman's] decades-long labor of documenting the improbable miracle that was and is ACT UP.

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. Schulman emphasizes the contributions of men of color, like the luminary artist Ray Navarro; of women of color, like the advocate for incarcerated people with HIV Katrina Haslip; and of lesbians, like the radical feminist Maxine Wolfe. Theirs is the ACT UP she wants younger activists to learn about.

... 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'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.

At first glance​ the title of Sarah Schulman’s remarkable history of the Aids pressure group ACT UP in New York has a cool authority at odds with the turbulent energy of the group itself, although justified by the meticulousness of her scholarship.

Let the Record Show’s massive size is the result of Schulman’s decision to structure the book around oral histories collected over the course of nearly twenty years for the ACT UP Oral History Project, which she cofounded with the experimental filmmaker Jim Hubbard.

Let the Record Show is in part a grand accounting, tallying up what was won, what was lost, and the process through which those battles were fought. Only by this kind of rigorous analysis can the lessons of ACT UP be passed on to current and future activists.

... deeply personal.

Schulman presents ACT UP not as a heroic, sanitized institution made up of exclusively white gay men, but as what it actually was: an organization that managed to improve the lives of people living with HIV and AIDS despite its own racism and sexism. By doing this, Schulman creates a much more nuanced—and accurate—portrait of the AIDS crisis, highlighting the ways the disease impacted women and people of color..

... a significant boots-on-the-ground account.

Schulman showcases the diverse array of people who worked to raise awareness about AIDS, and notes their simultaneous involvement in related issues including homelessness, gender inequity in medicine, and needle exchange programs.