The American People, Vol. 1 : Search for My Heart

Larry Kramer

ISBN 10: 1504621344 ISBN 13: 9781504621342

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc., 2015

Synopsis

In this magisterial novel's 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 Lincoln are thoroughly revised. In the twentieth century, a religious sect tries to exterminate homosexuals, and the AIDS virus begins to spread. Against all this, Kramer sets the tender story of a middle-class family trying to get along in the darkest of times.

About this title

About the Author:

Larry Kramer is an award-winning playwright and author, and a celebrated public-health and gay-rights advocate. He wrote the Academy Award-nominated screenplay adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love and rose to further prominence with his bestselling novel, Faggots. A pioneering AIDS activist, he cofounded the Gay Men's Health Crisis in 1982 and founded ACT UP in 1987. Kramer has won numerous awards for his plays and in 2013 was named a Master American Dramatist by the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater. In 2014, the HBO adaptation of his play The Normal Heart won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie.

Review:

Breathtakingly well-written. And how could one not keep reading, no matter how endless, a book with a line such as 'You don't just drop a penis like Tibby's into the narrative and let it go'? (Kirkus (starred review))

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. (T Fleischmann Publishers Weekly (boxed, signature review))

Larry Kramer is one of America's most valuable troublemakers. I hope he never lowers his voice. (Susan Sontag)

Larry Kramer has been a prophet of psychic health and catastrophe among us a prophet unmatched for the accuracy of his omens and the reliability of his anathemas and remedies. (The American Academy of Arts and Letters)

Larry Kramer's magnum opus. (Elissa Schappel Vanity Fair)

A work of sustained passion . . . Formidable. --(Dwight Garner The New York Times)

About this edition

• Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1504621344
• ISBN 13: 9781504621342
• Binding: Audio CD
• Number of pages: 1