The American People, Vol. 1: Search for My Heart Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Larry Kramer (Author), full cast (Narrator), Robertson Dean (Narrator),

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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 20th 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.

Listening Length

38 hours and 41 minutes
Author

Larry Kramer
Narrator

full cast, see all
Audible release date

May 12 2015
Language

English
Publisher

Blackstone Audio, Inc.
ASIN

B07231D5CM
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	38 hours and 41 minutes
Author	Larry Kramer
Narrator	full cast, Robertson Dean, Traber Burns, Keith Szarabajka, Ray Porter, Kate Reading, Richard Powers
Audible.ca Release Date	May 12 2015
Publisher	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B07231D5CM
Best Sellers Rank	#180,021 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #1,333 in LGBTQ2S+ Literature & Fiction (Audible Books & Originals) #2,514 in Humorous Fiction & Satire #7,638 in Literary Fiction (Audible Books & Originals)

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5

86 global ratings

5 star		61%
4 star		15%
3 star		8%
2 star		4%
1 star		12%

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Top review from Canada

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peter fraser

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 8, 2017

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Beautiful!

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G. giandinoto

Nuevo a precio bajo

Reviewed in Spain 🇪🇸 on December 30, 2018

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Nuevo y Con un precio muy bueno

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Rayford P. Kytle

Another capstone to a magnificent life

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 9, 2016

Verified Purchase

Larry Kramer produced and wrote the screenplay for the movie of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. Seeing it, alone, in a theater in 1969, startled me into recognizing and respecting the homosexual feelings I had been trying so hard to extinguish since puberty. Eventually, in 1973, I found the courage to act on them. By 1978, I was living in New York, in the gay carnival Kramer described in Faggots. His novel, which was castigated by virtually every gay person I knew, was a jeremiad in a Swiftian satire, lamenting that gay people were wasting our new freedom, erroneously thinking that by devoting our lives to sport sex, drugs and disco, we were building our utopia. Faggots warned that we were becoming the repellent gay couple in Gornergrat that Lawrence invidiously compares to the sensual soulmate relationship that Rupert yearns to have with Gerald. I remember admiring Kramer for his insight and idealism while feeling his portrayal of my world was unfairly harsh. But it was just two years before the lives we were living began to kill us, bringing home the message of the W.H. Auden poem Kramer used for the title of another book, We Must Love One Another or Die. How many lives would have been saved if we had taken the message of Faggots to heart?

Having validated many of the stereotypes that straight society had always had of us: frivolous, sex-crazed, irresponsible; many of them viewed gay people as dispensable if not deserving of the suffering that AIDS brought us. Larry leapt to the barricades and sounded the alarm, again despised by many gay people as a “sex negative” scold. Undeterred, he founded The Gay Men’s Health Crisis to ease the suffering of the dying and demand that the government mount an appropriate response to end it. He crafted his anger and frustration into The Normal Heart, which many theater critics decried as merely agitprop when it first opened in 1985. Once again, Larry’s anger – at the power structure for ignoring us and at gay people for not fighting for our lives – was met with opprobrium and he was fired by GMHC. Unstoppable, he formed ACT UP to nurture social activism in the gay community and to find innovative and effective ways to demand more be done to stop our plague. He nurtured the best and the brightest in ACT UP, who eventually formed TAG, whose courage and scholarship forced the Public Health Service to respect our voices and incorporate them into AIDS policy decisions. I can’t think of anyone who has done more to open the hearts and minds of America to gay people than Kramer. He deserves better praise than I am able to articulate. He is a living national treasure worthy of a place in the pantheon of human rights leaders of all time. In so many ways, particularly as a long-term survivor of HIV, I owe him my life.

With The American People, Kramer has turned his Swiftian satirical vision on the canon of American history. In The American People the satire ignites in the quiet, unsentimental fury at America for trying to erase the history of men loving men. This history: books, letters and art dealing with men loving men, has been burned, suppressed and ignored throughout our history. Kramer uses what scant historical evidence we do have to flesh out a fully imagined narrative of gay American history. The American People is an indictment of mainstream historians, whose imagining of the sexual lives, events and conversations among the heroes of American history has ignored and dismissed suggestions of homosexuality. Let others disprove his allegations about how the first American colonists – all men – survived without women for years; about Washington, Lafayette and Hamilton; about Lincoln and Josiah Speed; about what happened to gay people captured by the Nazis. Volume I ends with the McCarthy Hearings. Kramer brings gay American history out of the closet shouting stories that have never been told. There are no footnotes for all the historical references because no documentation exists for many of the details Kramer relates. There is a surreal aspect alongside the humor that is reminiscent of Vonnegut and Pynchon. For instance, Kramer anthropomorphizes the AIDS virus as a Satanic observer, who, no doubt, will figure larger in the sequel. Volume I ends in the McCarthy era. The full scope and structure of the work will only be evident when Volume II appears. I can hardly wait. At 81, this is another of what I hope is many more capstones to his magnificent life.

18 people found this helpful

Kent Allin

Excruciating ordeal.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 29, 2018

Verified Purchase

I have loved Kramer’s work in the past, especially Normal Heart - one of the most moving experiences I have ever had in the theater - and the screenplay for Women in Love. But this novel, almost 800 pages in length, is just painful to endure. It’s never clear what is history and what is fantasy. Characters come and go while making no lasting impression. I wish Larry Kramer a long life, but hope he’s not devoting it to Volume 2.

4 people found this helpful

Andrew

Great man, poor writing

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 9, 2018

Verified Purchase

As much as I respect Larry Kramer for what he has done for the gay community, this novel is hard to get through. Parts of the book are fiction, others historical. The beginning is perverse. I read on, hoping that it would lead me to something of substance. It did not. Additionally, his economy of language is poor, so you have to spent much of the time getting through nonsense to figure out what he's trying to convey. I wish I could have returned this book or exchange it for something else.

5 people found this helpful

MIchael G

Very amazing

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 28, 2015

Verified Purchase

I have to agree with other reviewers of both sides - in part it was a long "sloggish" read and I didn't understand the point of some narratives, but in other parts it was shocking and riveting and I couldn't put it down. I'm not familiar with Larry Kramer's writing style - I know all about him but have never read his books. This was definitely worth my time and I very much look forward to a Volume 2. It's clear he has put so much thought, imagination, and emotion into this tome.

2 people found this helpful

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The American People, Vol. 1: Search for My Heart Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

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