Happy Birthday, Studs!
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070515/PEOPLE/705160301
Truly a great man, and a great American.
Reading Working in college was a transformative experience. Happy Birthday, Mr. Terkel, and it’s good to have you with us still.
Most of Studs’ books are better than anybody else’s best at conveying what life is about. What an amazing job! Happy birthday, sir!
He is the best there ever was for what he does. Besides Working already mentioned, The Good War was another of his books that held me spellbound.
Amazing guy. I’ve seen him speak a few times and I’ve read American Dreams. I would like to try my hand at oral history at least once.
If you’ve ever read transcripts of actual interviews, you’ll know that they’re very messy. Like when most of us talk, there’s a lot of pauses, er’s and um’s, repititions, ellipses, and back tracking. What he does is make the interview fascinating. Maybe it’s not that hard to do in short doses, such as in a magazine interview, but his interviews go for pages and pages, while retaining the informant’s unique voice. You can almost picture the person talking.