Oral History Books

Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression

Studs Terkel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

First published in 1970, this classic of oral history features the voices of men and women who lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s. It includes accounts by congressmen C. Wright Patman and Hamilton Fish, as well as failed presidential candidate Alf M. Landon, who recalls what it was like to be governor of Kansas in 1933:

Men with tears in their eyes begged for an appointment that would help save their homes and farms. I couldn't see them all in my office. But I never let one of them leave without my coming out and shakin' hands with 'em. I listened to all their stories, each one of 'em. But it was obvious I couldn't take care of all their terrible needs.

The book includes also the perspectives of ordinary men and women, such as Jim Sheridan, who took part in the 1932 march by World War I veterans to petition for their benefits in Washington, D.C., where they were repelled by army troops led by General Douglas MacArthur. Or Edward Santander, who was a child then: "My first memories come about '31. It was simply a gut issue then: eating or not eating, living or not living." Studs Terkel makes history come alive, drawing out experiences and emotions from his interviewees to the degree few have ever been able to match.

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do

Studs Terkel

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Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Organizational Behavior -> Workplace

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Book was STOLEN from Chicago Public Library 1 out of 5 stars.
3 of 60 people found this review helpful.

The book was in great condition, with one MAJOR catch: it had a Chicago Public Library bar code on it. I called the library, read them the bar code, and they asked me to please return it, as it had been taken without their permission. Amazon kindly sent me another book, and the stolen edition goes back to the library!

Life-altering perspectives 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This book changed my life. I read it when it was new, at a time when I was becoming incredibly discontent in my first real career position job. What struck me about the people in this book was that almost all of them are busy doing work they don't really care for, and which many of them downright hate. They feel trapped and are unhappy, but they stick at it because they have bills to pay. The people who in contrast were doing work that they *loved* had a magical time of it. They were also few and far between. After I read this I questioned why people choose to make themselves unhappy at work they hate, when they could (as we say these days but didn't, then) "follow their bliss" and find what gives them joy. I have never looked at work the same way since, and the insights I gained from this book gave me the courage to leave a bad situation in order to find a better path to fulfillment. This is an amazing work of oral history, and the love work/hate work issue is just as relevant today.

Editorial Review:

Studs Terkel records the voices of America. Men and women from every walk of life talk to him, telling him of their likes and dislikes, fears, problems, and happinesses on the job. Once again, Terkel has created a rich and unique document that is as simple as conversation, but as subtle and heartfelt as the meaning of our lives.... In the first trade paperback edition of his national bestseller, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel presents "the real American experience" (Chicago Daily News)--"a magnificent book . . .. A work of art. To read it is to hear America talking." (Boston Globe).

The Good War: An Oral History of World War II

Studs Terkel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Negative "cherry pickin'" 1 out of 5 stars.
7 of 19 people found this review helpful.

I expected a history of the war through eyewitness accounts, but got a collection of cherry picked anecdotes selected to make an anti-war statement. Some of the stories are interesting and revealing of aspects of the time, but this is not a definitive history of WWII by any means.

Editorial Review:

Studs Terkel, the noted Chicago-based journalist, gathers the reminiscences of 121 participants in World War II (called "the good war" because, in the words of one soldier, "to see fascism defeated, nothing better could have happened to a human being"). These participants, men and women, famous and ordinary, tell stories that add immeasurably to our understanding of that cataclysmic time. One Soviet soldier recounts that, surrounded by the Germans, his comrades tapped the powder from their last cartridges and inserted notes to their families inside the casings; Russian children, he goes on, still turn these up every now and again and deliver the notes to the soldiers' families. Terkel touches on many themes along the way, including institutionalized racism in the United States military, the birth of the military-industrial complex, and the origins of the Cold War.

Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project

Dave Isay

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Total reviews: 39 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From more than ten thousand interviews, StoryCorps-the largest oral history project in the nation's history-presents a tapestry of American stories, told by the people who lived them to the people they love.

StoryCorps began with the idea that everyone has an important story to tell. And since 2003, this remarkable project has been collecting the stories of everyday Americans and preserving them for future generations. In New York City and in mobile recording booths traveling the country-from small towns to big cities, at Native American reservations and an Army post-StoryCorps is collecting the memories of Americans from all ages, backgrounds, and walks of life. The project represents a wondrous nationwide celebration of our shared humanity, capturing for posterity the stories that define us and bind us together.

In Listening Is an Act of Love, StoryCorps founder and legendary radio producer Dave Isay selects some of the most remarkable stories from the already vast collection and arranges them thematically into a moving portrait of American life. The voices here connect us to real people and their lives-to their experiences of profound joy, sadness, courage and despair, to good times and hard times, to good deeds and misdeeds.

To read this book is to be reminded of how rich and varied the American storybook truly is, how resistant to easy categorization or caricature. Above all, this book honors the gift each StoryCorps participant has made, from the raw material of his or her life, to the Americans who will come after. We are our history, individually and collectively, and Listening Is an Act of Love touchingly reminds us of this powerful truth.

Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's (Perennial Classics)

Frederick L. Allen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Contemporary AND historical!Recently while doing research for an exhibition on the 1920s, I purchased this fabulous little book 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Recently while doing research for an exhibition on the 1920s, I purchased this fabulous little book called Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s. Historian Frederick Lewis Allen wrote it in 1931, before Prohibition was even repealed!

I bought it because I wanted a contemporary perspective on the decade from someone who was there. I was astounded at his insight into a decade that he not only lived through, but also did not have much distance from.

As a rule, historians generally wait at least a decade in order to examine the recent past. When you are still living through it, you often don't have enough perspective to evaluate what the implications were or are going to be.

However, Allen was spot on with his analysis of the 1920s. He admits early in the text that he is not trying to make any sweeping historical observations, and he is keenly aware of the dangers of trying to interpret events that were so recent. Instead, he says he is writing to capture the spirit of the age, as he remembers it.

But I found that many of his statements were consistent with current historical scholarship of that era.

His analysis of the Red Scare was particularly insightful. He writes, "...upholders of every sort of cause, good, bad, and indifferent, all wrapped themselves in Old Glory and the mantle of the Founding Fathers and allied their opponents with Lenin...A cloud of suspicion hung in the air, and intolerance became an American virtue."

Considering he was writing only 10 years after fear of communism swept this country, I was impressed with his courage to be honest about what was really going on. Although by the end of the decade, people were no longer concerned about a communist revolution, those who led the charge were certainly still alive.

His attitude toward Prohibition represented the common thought of the era that the "noble experiment" was indeed a failure. Yet, it would be two years after his book was published that the 21st amendment was ratified.

He accurately describes the spirit of the times, writing, "In those days people sat with bated breath to hear how So-and-So had made very good gin right in his own cellar, and just what formula would fulfill the higher destiny of raisins, and how bootleggers brought liquor down from Canada."

The 1920s were of course a time of radical change in manner and morals. People rejected anything "old fashioned," looking instead to what was current and up-to-date. "It was better to be modern - and everybody wanted to be modern - and sophisticated, and smart, to smash the conventions and to be devastatingly frank," Allen writes. "And with a cocktail glass in one's hand it was easy at least to be frank."

Allen also writes about the Scopes "monkey trial" - challenging the teaching of evolution in schools - with a hint of humor that really captures the bewilderment of the locals: "It was a strange trial. Into the quiet town of Dayton flocked gaunt Tennessee farmers and their families in mule-drawn wagons and ramshackle Fords; quiet, godly people in overalls and gingham and black, ready to defend their faith against `foreigners,' yet curious to know what this new-fangled evolutionary theory might be."

When my book arrived, it was obviously a bit tattered. My copy was from the 1964 reprint, so it looked a bit dated from what you expect from modern history books. The print was quite small and seemed intimidating when I first opened it. There is a 1997 and 2000 reprint available as well.

But it turned out to be the most interesting read of any book I used for my research!

Allen is witty, extremely intelligent, and has the unique perspective that can only be achieved by living through these events yourself.

If you are a Roaring Twenties enthusiast, or only casually interested in the era, I highly recommend this book. It provided me with a wealth of information, and lots of snappy quotes that really added to my exhibition.

Editorial Review:

Only Yesterday deals with that delightful decade from the Armistice in November 1918 to the panic and depression of 1929-30. Here is the story of Woodrow Wilson's defeat, the Harding scandals, the Coolidge prosperity, the revolution in manners and morals, the bull market and its smash-up. Allen's lively narrative brings back an endless variety of half-forgotten events, fashions, crazes, and absurdities. Deftly written, with a humorous touch, Only Yesterday traces, beneath the excitements of day-to-day life in the 20s, those currents in national life and thought which are the essence of true history.

Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

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Total reviews: 50 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Gripping Horrific Account of Life in the Auschwitz Death Camp 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Dr. Miklos Nyiszli has written (1960) a graphic, gruesome, first-hand account of his time working as a doctor in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Due to his previous medical training in medicine and pathology, Dr. Nyiszli was spared by the hideously inhuman Dr. Josef Mengele, to be the medical doctor to the Sonderkommando, the 600-plus Jewish prisioners who actually operated the creamatorium ovens which incinerated over 3,000 inmates a day. Dr. Nyiszli also became the chief pathologist for Dr. Mengele's infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners, performing disections and autopsies, all explained in great detail.

Dr. Nyiszli had permission from Dr. Mengele to travel through the camp, and therefore witnessed atrocities that are shock all sensibilities, and are sickening in the cruelty in which they were carried out. One wonders how the guards can kill in such a matter of fact manner, so many men, women, children, grandmothers, and grandfathers, without being emotionally devastated. He described the entire process of how the Jewish populations were induced to walk into the gas chambers without resistance. How they died a horrible death in the gas chambers, how their bodies were striped of hair and gold teeth, and then incinerated in non-stop 24 hour a day operation in the four ovens. When the gas chambers were overflowing with Jewish bodies, he writes of hundreds of others standing in line to be shot to death with a single bullet in the back of the head, then dumped into a long burning death pit, created for just such a purpose. He describes how a 16 year old girl miraculously survived being gassed in the chamber, only to be shot the next day. He describes how whole camps of upwards of 4,500 people were "liquidated" in one day. Dr. Nyiszli is continually stunned by the utter brutality of the German Nazis and the ultimate purpose of Auschwitz - to destroy the Jewish race and other "undesirables".

Since the Sonderkommando group of prisoners were themselves shot to death every 4 months to prevent anyone from telling the world what the Germans were doing in the camps, it is a miracle that Dr. Nyiszli survived to tell the atrocities of the death camp.

Fortunately for history, and for the lesson of man's inhumanity to man, we have Dr. Nyiszli's account to tell the world the truth about what happened in Hiltler's concentration camps. Although very disturbing to read, this is an important account that absolutely refutes modern-day revisionists who claim there was no holocaust, or that is was greatly exaggerated.

This book is not for young eyes. The descriptions of the deaths are too vivid. However, it is an important book for students of history and for any who need to be reminded of the incredible cruelty man is capable of. While sobering and horrific to read, I do recommend this book to those interested in the holocaust. It is one of the better books in the genre.

James Konedog Koenig

Editorial Review:

Auschwitz was one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the American public; this is, as the New York Review of Books said, "the best brief account of the Auschwitz experience available."

Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times

Studs Terkel

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

While American military forces seek to defeat an enemy that has no nation and American citizens ponder a future inextricably linked to the threat of terrorism, legendary writer Studs Terkel steps forward with a remarkable volume of oral histories that sheds new light on fighting for a just cause in uncertain times. As the title of Hope Dies Last suggests, Terkel's interviews all deal with the notion of finding hope in difficult times and holding on to that hope (of a better job, a better life, justice, peace) despite often overwhelming odds. Terkel draws his subjects from an incredibly broad range of backgrounds: pardoned Illinois death row inmate Leroy Orange discusses the events of his life, 94-year-old famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith talks about Enron, undocumented Guatemalans tell of trying to merely survive in modern America. While each testimonial is compelling in its own way, they combine to form a mosaic of human tenacity. Often, as in the case of 1960s civil rights activists, the subjects' ideas are accepted in the long run, for others, including a resident of Chicago's Cabrini Green housing project, the struggle is only just beginning. Terkel, 91 years old at the time of this book's publication, draws from a wealth of human experience but is spry enough to take on new causes and skillfully profile youthful activists with emerging causes. And Hope Dies Last is still a Studs Terkel book, full of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's brand of blue-collar, rabble-rousing, union-card-waving brand of broad shouldered Chicago liberalism that makes the current wave of political writers seem a bit green and petty by comparison. For all of their success in selling books that accuse one another of being liars and idiots, those writers would do well to get out and meet even a few of the people that Studs Terkel has been talking to for years. --John Moe

The Slaves' War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves

Andrew Ward

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The first narrative history of the Civil War told by the very people it freed

Groundbreaking, compelling, and poignant, The Slaves' War delivers an unprecedented vision of the nation's bloodiest conflict. An acclaimed historian of nineteenth-century and African-American history, Andrew Ward gives us the first narrative of the Civil War told from the perspective of those whose destiny it decided. Woven together from hundreds of interviews, diaries, letters, and memoirs, here is the Civil War as seen from not only battlefields, capitals, and camps, but also slave quarters, kitchens, roadsides, farms, towns, and swamps. Speaking in a quintessentially American language of wit, candor, and biblical power, army cooks and launderers, runaways, teamsters, and gravediggers bring the war to vivid life.

From slaves' theories about the causes of the war to their frank assessments of such major figures as Lincoln, Davis, Lee, and Grant; from their searing memories of the carnage of battle to their often startling attitudes toward masters and liberators alike; and from their initial jubilation at the Yankee invasion of the slave South to the crushing disappointment of freedom's promise unfulfilled, The Slaves' War is a transformative and engrossing vision of America's Second Revolution.

In the Country of Brooklyn: Inspiration to the World

Peter Golenbock

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

One of every seven people in the United States can trace their family back to Brooklyn, New York—all seventy-one square miles of it; home to millions of people from every corner of the globe over the last 150 years. Now Peter Golenbock, the author of the acclaimed book Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers, returns to Kings County to collect the firsthand stories of the life and times of the people of Brooklyn—and how they changed the world.

The nostalgic myth that is Brooklyn is all about egg creams and stickball, and, of course, the Dodgers. The Dodgers left fifty years ago, but Brooklyn is still here—transformed by waves of suburban flight, new immigrants, urban homesteaders, and gentrification. Deep down, Brooklyn has always been about new ideas—freedom and tolerance paramount among them—that have changed the world, all the way back to Lady Deborah Moody, who escaped religious persecution in both Old and New England, and founded Coney Island and the town of Gravesend in the 1600s.

So why was Jackie Robinson embraced by Brooklynites of all colors, and so despised everywhere else? Why was Brooklyn one of the first urban areas to decay into slums—and one of the first to be reborn? And what was it that made Brooklynites fight for their rights, for their country, for their ideas—sometimes to the detriment of their own well-being? In the Country of Brooklyn, filled with rare photos, is history at its very best—engaging, personal, fascinating—a social history and a history of social justice; an oral history of a land and its people spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; a microcosm of how Americans there faced and defeated discrimination, oppression, and unjust laws, and fought for what was right. And the voices and stories are as amazing as they are varied.

Meet: Daily Worker sportswriter Lester Rodney • rock and roll DJ "Cousin Brucie" Morrow • labor leader Henry Foner • Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa • journalist and author Pete Hamill • Black Panther-turned-politician Charles Barron • Hall of Fame baseball player Monte Irvin • Spanish Civil War veteran Abe Smorodin • borough president Marty Markowitz • real estate developer Joseph Sitt • jujitsu world champion Robert Crosson • songwriter Neil Sedaka • NYPD officer John Mackie • ACLU president Ira Glasser • and many others!

It's Brooklyn as we've never seen it before, a place of social activism, political energy, and creative thinking—a place whose vitality has spread around the world for more than 350 years. And a place where you can still get a decent egg cream.

Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Troubled Times

Studs Terkel

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The latest oral history from the unrivaled master of the genre.

Hope Dies Last is Studs Terkel's inspiring new oral history of social action in America. An alternative, more personal history of the "American century," Hope Dies Last forms a legacy of the indefatigable spirit that Studs has always embodied, and an inheritance for those who, by taking a stand, are making concrete the dreams of today.

For Terkel, these interviews represent a change that has taken place in the last few years of uncertainty in America. From a doctor who teaches his young students compassion, to the now-retired brigadier general who flew the Enola Gay over Hiroshima, these interviews tell us much about the power of the American dream and the force of individuals who hope for a better world. Terkel's subjects express with grace and warmth their secret hopes and dreams, combining to tell an inspiring story of optimism and persistence that resonates with the eloquence of conviction.