Books like Let the Record Show by Sarah Schulman

Cora, a woman enslaved on a Georgia cotton plantation, partners with a new slave named Caesar to flee the South. Their daring escape follows a literal underground network of tunnels that mirrors the perilous journey of countless fugitive slaves toward freedom.

A son writes an unabridged, eloquent letter to his ill‑literate mother, uncovering her Vietnamese‑American family history and confronting themes of race, class, masculinity, trauma and LGBTQ identity.

Twin African American sisters flee their hometown after their father's murder—one chooses to pass as white while the other stays true to her identity, exploring race, family, and the complexities of self through generations.

The Gentrification of the Mind is a memoir that traces the decline of New York’s vibrant queer culture and downtown arts scene during the AIDS crisis, blending personal recollection with sharp analysis of urban change and loss.

Sarah Schulman’s memoir examines how her novel People in Trouble was appropriated by the Broadway hit Rent, uncovering broader issues of AIDS representation and the commodification of LGBTQ culture in American theater.

291 pages : 22 cm

"In Victorian London, filth was everywhere : horse traffic filled the streets with dung, household rubbish went uncollected, cesspools brimmed with 'night soil', graveyards teemed with rotting corpses, the air itself was choked with smoke. In this intimately visceral book, Lee Jackson guides us through the underbelly of the Victorian metropolis, introducing us to the men and women who struggled to stem a rising tide of pollution and dirt, and the forces that opposed them." --from inside jacket flap.

In the late 1980s, after a decade spent engaged in more routine interest-group politics, thousands of lesbians and gay men responded to the AIDS crisis by defiantly and dramatically taking to the streets. But by the early 1990s, the organization they founded, ACT UP, was no more—even as the AIDS epidemic raged on. Weaving together interviews with activists, extensive research, and reflections on the author’s time as a member of the organization, Moving Politics is the first book to chronicle the rise and fall of ACT UP, highlighting a key factor in its trajectory: emotion. Surprisingly overlooked by many scholars of social movements, emotion, Gould argues, plays a fundamental role in political activism. From anger to hope, pride to shame, and solidarity to despair, feelings played a significant part in ACT UP’s provocative style of protest, which included raucous demonstrations, die-ins, and other kinds of street theater. Detailing the movement’s public triumphs and private setbacks, Moving Politics is the definitive account of ACT UP’s origin, development, and decline as well as a searching look at the role of emotion in contentious politics.

A candid memoir of Cleve Jones, activist, and AIDS advocate, tracing his rise in 1970s San Francisco, his partnership with Harvey Milk, and his battles against the AIDS crisis, culminating in founding the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the AIDS Memorial Quilt.