Description: "In the 1990's Sarah Schulman saw the relevance of the McCarthy era to contemporary American life, and the impact of its unaddressed consequences. But with an innovative vision, she chose to transpose the classic tropes of 1940's and 50's American cinema by positioning a Black straight man and a Queer Jewish woman as the emblematic Americans, through whose eyes we revisit our nation's complex past. Set before the advent of the collective revolutionary movements of the 1960's these individuals, Cal and Sylvia want the promise of The American Dream, and find out the hard way that - alone- it is not available to them. Using set pieces of mid-century Americana: The Steno Pool, The Stork Club, The Bar and Grill, and snappy comebacks of film noir, Schulman was decades ahead in reimagining whose stories could tell the collective history"--
Brief description: Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, and AIDS historian. She is the author of twenty books including, most recently, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993.
Review Quotes: A well-researched, energetic, bitterly truthful novel . . . wonderfully nuanced . . . It is Schulman's ability to look pain in the eye and convert it to wisdom that the reader admires.-- "San Francisco Chronicle"