The American People, Vol. 1

The American People, Vol. 1

By Larry Kramer
Unabridged
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“Kramer is a singular force, furious because he cares. He honestly confronts hard, unspoken truths and goes somewhere with them, which is a rare thing.”

Publishers Weekly (boxed, signature review)

The long-awaited new novel by America’s master playwright and activist—a radical reimagining of our history and our hopes and fears

Forty years in the making, The American People embodies Larry Kramer’s vision of his beloved and accursed homeland. As the founder of ACT UP and the author of Faggots and The Normal Heart, Kramer has decisively affected American lives and letters. Here, as only he can, he tells the heartbreaking and heroic story of one nation under a plague, contaminated by greed, hate, and disease yet host to transcendent acts of courage and kindness.

In this magisterial novel’s sweeping first volume, which runs up to the 1950s, we meet prehistoric monkeys who spread a peculiar virus, a Native American shaman whose sexual explorations mutate into occult visions, and early English settlers who live as loving same-sex couples only to fall victim to the forces of bigotry. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton revel in unexpected intimacies, and John Wilkes Booth’s motives for assassinating Abraham Lincoln are thoroughly revised. In the twentieth century, the nightmare of history deepens as a religious sect conspires with eugenicists, McCarthyites, and Ivy Leaguers to exterminate homosexuals, and the AIDS virus begins to spread. Against all this, Kramer sets the tender story of a middle-class family outside Washington, DC, trying to get along in the darkest of times.

The American People is a work of ribald satire, prophetic anger, and dazzling imagination. It is an encyclopedic indictment written with outrageous love.

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  1. ShortNFuzzy
    Overall Not for me

    Brace yourself...

    This is a hell of an achievement. So many narrators. So many characters. All putting their best foot forward, including the author. So why don't I recommend it? Two reasons: 1. I don't see what the author was going for. What's the end game? What's the point? I really didn't "get it" and I admit that is entirely a matter of opinion. 2. And this one is flat out fact, but still pertains to just me...there are passages throughout this 38 hour audio book that had me beyond nauseous...to the point of pulling the car to the side of the road for fear of retching. Ugly, perverse, shocking, nauseating, depraved passages. Much worse than anything I have ever read or heard in any form of media. Larry Kramer, if this was your intention, then well done! If not, then for the love of pearl, what WAS it?

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