Customer Reviews

Like People in History

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This is an update to my review of December, 1998. I read this book five years ago, and still I consider it one of my all-time favorite books. I have recommended it to just about everyone I know. Give it a try! You won't be disappointed! Other books I would like to recommend are Frontiers by Michael Jensen, Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai, Lawnboy by Paul Lisicky, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, and Dream Boy by Michael Grimsley. The text of my previous review 12/28/98 is below:

This is one of those books that when you're finished, you wish you weren't! The characters are realistic, the dialogue is believable, and the plot totally engaging! It also helps us put "our" history into some perspective. It was interesting for me to compare being gay in the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's. I loved the characters in this book. You will recognize all of them. Don't let the length of this book scare you away - it's worth it, and you'll be wishing for more! His writing style takes a little getting used to as he jumps back and forth between time periods, but you'll get used to it! After I've read most books, I give them away to friends. This is one of those books that I can't bear to give up. It will have a place on my bookshelf forever. Oh, by the way, I read this book in the summer of 1996 ! :>

This book is embarrassingly bad. I find it incredible that he got it published. Every character is an unbelievable cliche. He tries to include everything that has happened to the Gay community in the US over the last few decades, and it all ends up reading like a really, really bad romance novel. Yuck.

I've read this book 3 times now and I know I will read it again and again. Don't we all have our own image of Roger and, of course, Matt Loguidice. This is probably my second favorite gay novel, after How Long Has This Been Going On? by Ethan Mordden.

LIKE PEOPLE IN HISTORY is a meaty epic spanning 40 years and which chronicles the ups and downs of a love/hate/envy relationship between gorgeous and charismatic cousins Roger and Alistair. These boys are sooooo in the very thick of things that this juicy plot-driven novel also serves as a overall history of a lost gay generation. Wherever there's a place to be these boys are THERE - Woodstock, Fire Island, The 'A' list parties, ACT-UP, you name it. This book is also about changing over time and with age - maturing and adapting. Accomplished author Picano pours a wealth of drama, melodrama, and humor into this VERY absorbing pot boiler. Loose yourself in these pages...it's lotsa fun.

As a 20-something, I find it fascinating to read or hear about the lives of gay men during the last century. Picano weaves an intricate tale of the two cousins Roger and Alistair, about how their lives intersected at pivotal points in our shared gay history. I especially enjoyed the scenes set on Fire Island - though only a generation removed, the fun they depicted seems from another world. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about the glbt movement in the latter half of the 20th century, and how remaining loyal and diligent to friendships can make a difference in our lives.

I first started to read this book a couple of years ago - having read his excellent book 'The Lure' and a couple of other things he'd written - but gave up about half way through, disappointed that it was not in the same league as 'The Lure' - a league that it's probably too hard for any writer to be in all of the time. Then this last Christmas, I gave it another shot and wouldn't you know, I didn't want it to end.

The characters are all a bit too beautiful, all a bit too talented, all a bit too free of the mundane realities that face the rest of us like bad haircuts and parking tickets, laundry and ironing, supermarket queues, emptying dishwashers, credit card debt, fighting middle age spread, and so on - like the real people in history we all know oursleves to be. And it is our history that Picano uses and most of us know it very well - so every once in a while it becomes rather unreal in his cleverly middle class retelling of it. The dilemmas however, that face his characters are the dilemmas that most of us faced as gay men during the past 20 or 30 years, whether in the US or anywhere else in the western world.

Picano may be all sorts of things. If he is anything like his central characters, I imagine him to be a bit full of himself, a bit egotistical. I imagine that his books are always a tad biographical, and I imagine that he really does believe that he has been at the epicentre of gay life in the US, even the entire universe, these past 30 or so years. What I actually do know is that he has an uncanny ability to engage me as a reader - well a lot of the time if not always. And when he does, I am invariably moved, changed, and feel better for it. I feel a genuine appreciation that even if we have lived vastly different lives over more or less the same period, Picano has managed to pluck the strings of some of the most poignant, compelling and important themes that we all to some extent understand at a personal level.

I actually found myself thinking that so many of the things he had his characters do were implausible, over the top, or simply too pretentious for words, but I also felt that I wanted to know how it all turned out for them. I felt engaged by them. I felt a kind of voyeuristic excitement, a vicarious thrill, looking in on such 'beautiful' people, not because any of them were really so very smart or, dollars aside, really doing all that well, but because I wanted to know how they coped with emotions that we all deal with at some time or other. And that is Picano's strength - or at least one of them - and it's why I know I'll keep reading him. It's not so much his plots - though they're not bad - even when he draws on real events. Nor is it his main characters - nearly always educated middle class heroic types - as his truly wonderful ability to simply tell a story.

Once I got into this book I felt uplifted and I just wanted to keep reading. All in all it's a book I'm especially pleased I've read.

Like people in history IS certainly campny and to a degree, not very believable; nonetheless, it chronicles major events in (gay) history: the pre-Stonewall sixties, followed by the revolution and the disco-glam culture, followed by the remorse, apathy, regret and reflection of the nineties and AIDS. It certainly is not a believable book in that it isn't dealing with the average gay man's life. Nonetheless, for gay men who want to know where we come from, and what we have endured, the book is exellent in giving a broad overview of the final decades of the 20th century.

The Kirkus reviewer has his head up his butt. This is a wonderful book that follows two gay cousins from the '50's to the '90's with humor, heart, and sharp details. The last few pages are heartbreaking. A gem of a book

I read this book right after it came out and fell in love with it. So much so, that I purchased several copies and mailed them to my friends as XMas gifts. While some topical devices are incorrect, this is a great read. When Matt died, I really cried. Allister is the typical bitchy queen one sees so often and Roger seems to be an observer more than a participant in many of the novel's adventures. All in all a great read and one worth making into a film.

Every culture seeks writers to chronicle history. The last century exploded with changes in the perception of gay men (by outsiders as well as among gay men), climaxing in Stonewall. All of the events, movements, madness, sexual freedom and the catastrophy of AIDS need documentation AND novelization and who can do this better than Felice Picano, Andrew Holleran, Edmund White, Alan Hollingshurst, Jim Grimsley, to name only a few. In PEOPLE LIKE HISTORY Picano takes all of this on, molds the history into characters who are unforgetable, and in doing so he makes us examine the past and look carefully at the future. This is an important (and very enjoyable) novel.