New York, New York

The July 22 issue of the Washington Post's Book World featured a combined review of two different memoirs about New York City in the 1980s: Thomas Mallon's The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994 and John Loughery’s Where the Pulse Lives.

Charles Kaiser (whose The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America was one of the first books our group discussed, way back in 1999) is an almost exact contemporary of Mallon and Loughery, so he is perfectly placed to assess their accounts of gay life in the Big Apple during the AIDS epidemic. He is far more enthusiastic about Loughery's memoir than Mallon's, and his reasons for that judgment strike me as sound. Still, I'm a big enough fan of Mallon that I plan to read his book, too--but only after Loughery's.