A well-made disco ball of a book — it’s big, discursive, ardent, intellectual and flecked with gossip.

A salacious oral history of the publication that reads like a night at a gossipy media party.

Raucous.

She keeps her narrative moving while sporadically highlighting crucial, but lesser-known figures.

An oral history that’s as animated as a packed express train rollicking through the Manhattan underground..

The collage of interviews in The Freaks Came Out to Write extends from the paper’s idealistic beginnings to its tawdry decline.

Extraordinary.

Scrappy, compendious.

The chorus evokes what now feels like the quaint bohemian radicalism of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s..

Wonderful.

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.

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.

An absorbing firsthand history.

A phenomenal oral history.

Eyewitness testimony makes for a vibrant media history..