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The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture
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About This Book
A rollicking history of America's most iconic weekly newspaper told through the voices of its legendary writers, editors, and photographers. You either were there or you wanted to be. A defining New York City institution co-founded by Norman Mailer, The Village Voice was the first newspaper to cover hip-hop, the avant-garde art scene, and Off-Broadway with gravitas. It reported on the AIDS crisis with urgency and seriousness when other papers dismissed it as a gay disease. In 1979, the Voice 's Wayne Barrett uncovered Donald Trump as a corrupt con artist before anyone else was paying attention. It invented new forms of criticism and storytelling and revolutionized journalism, spawning hundreds of copycats. With more than 200 interviews, including two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Colson Whitehead, cultural critic Greg Tate, gossip columnist Michael Musto, and feminist writers Vivian Gornick and Susan Brownmiller, former Voice writer Tricia Romano pays homage to the paper that saved NYC landmarks from destruction and exposed corrupt landlords and judges. With interviews featuring post-punk band, Blondie, sportscaster Bob Costas, and drummer Max Weinberg, of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, in this definitive oral history, Romano tells the story of journalism, New York City and American culture—and the most famous alt-weekly of all time.
Reviews
"It's also fun as hell to read."
"Romano lucidly tracks the changes of ownership and the ungodly number of editors in chief ..."
"A rueful elegy for rawer, cheaper, better days."
"Eyewitness testimony makes for a vibrant media history."
"The chorus evokes what now feels like the quaint bohemian radicalism of the 1960s, '70s and '80s."
"An absorbing firsthand history ..."
"Unfolds like the kind of epic, many-roomed party that invokes the spirit of other parties and their immortal ghosts ..."
"Brimming with riveting anecdotes and capturing its subject's rollicking spirit, this is a remarkable portrait of the "nation's first alternative newspaper."
"A door-stopping, decades-spanning oral history stitched together from more than two hundred interviews she conducted as well as materials drawn from the oral history archive at Columbia University ..."
"A delicious oral history that uses extracts from more than two hundred interviews ..."
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