The Barnes & Noble Review
In Listening Is an Act of Love, acclaimed radio producer Dave Isay admits that the book in your hands really wasn't written for you. Listening consists of 49 excerpts from the 10,000 interviews people have recorded -- either in one of New York City's two permanent booths (at Grand Central Station and at Ground Zero) or in one of the three mobile booths touring the country -- since the project's launch four years ago.
StoryCorps functions very simply. Participants make an appointment to visit a booth; they bring a family member or friend and, with a facilitator present, interview that person for 40 minutes. Two CD recordings of the interview are made: the participants keep one, and the other becomes part of an archive at the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center in Washington, DC. (Selections are also broadcast on National Public Radio.)
But as Isay writes, his ambitious oral history project wasn't developed "for the benefit of an audience"; rather, it was "principally focused on enhancing the lives of the participants."
StoryCorps' success on that level seeps from the pages of the collection, both in the delight interviewees obviously take in reliving good times and in the catharsis many experience describing painful episodes. Reading the book is like eavesdropping on moments of rare connection between people, and the sensation can be exhilarating.
One of the most striking things about the book is how frequently one person says to another some version of "I was never able to say this to you before" or "I never knew you felt that way." Clearly, there's something about being in that booth that emboldens people to express thoughts that might otherwise have remained unarticulated. The process also seems to lend a renewed gravity to accounts that have already been shared. A grandson tells his grandfather, "I'd heard these stories before, but in this setting it was very special."
It's perhaps to be expected that some of the most moving selections have to do with extraordinary experiences. Hearing an 87-year-old World War II veteran tell his son-in-law that he's haunted by the face of a young German he killed in battle -- "To this day I wake up many nights crying over this kid.... And I don't know how to get him off my mind" -- offers an intimate and unnerving snapshot of war. But even in less dramatic tales, as Isay says, there is "eloquence, power, grace, and poetry in the words of everyday people." A Pittsburgh steelworker being interviewed by a friend says, "Steelmaking is...unimaginable beauty. When you're charging a furnace, you get all these sparkles off of the iron, and so you just see thousands and thousands of sparkles." When Studs Terkel, the nonagenarian granddaddy of oral history, spoke at StoryCorps' ribbon cutting in 2003, he declared, "In this booth the noncelebrated will speak of their lives.... And suddenly they will realize that they are the ones who have built this country." The steelworker's proud description of his craft beautifully fulfills Terkel's promise.
I was occasionally startled by a participant's response to a question, and given that so much of today's popular culture follows a predictable narrative arc, I appreciated the reminder that people can surprise you. One young man who tracked down his birth mother while in college concludes his session by asking her, in reference to his adoption, "Knowing what you know now, would you do it again?" She's just detailed the very legitimate reasons for her decision, so I was slightly taken aback by her reply: "I wouldn't do it again. The separation and the loss is just way too hard." An inmate who recorded an interview in the Oregon State Penitentiary refutes that old saw about how all prisoners say they're there by mistake; he remarks of his sentence for robbery, "I'm guilty of the charges I'm here for. I can't blame nobody but the person I look at in the mirror every day." An elderly man who cared for his Alzheimer's-afflicted wife for years before her death tells his grandson, "I found it absolutely painless taking care of her.... I find this period to be much more unsatisfactory than all of those years of caring for her."
The obvious question with a collection based on recorded interviews is whether it's a drawback that readers can't hear the speakers' voices. There were several instances reading the book that I went to the StoryCorps web site and searched for participants because I so wanted to hear the inflections and cadences as particular stories were being told. Parenthetical editorial additions like "crying" and "weeping" might cue readers' emotional responses, but seeing those words is not the same as actually hearing a voice begin to crack.
Isay's voice is rarely present in his radio documentaries, and I wish he'd shown a little of the same restraint here (in addition to an introduction and conclusion, he introduces each chapter). I enjoyed learning about the circumstances that led him to forgo medical school for a career in radio but grew weary of his platitudinous statements about StoryCorps. He writes that the interviews honor ordinary people who, "in their day-to-day acts of kindness, courage, and humanity, embody the true spirit of our nation." Elsewhere he says that many of the project's trained facilitators say "they've come to recognize a simple truth: that people are basically good."
The temptation to wrap a bow around these stories and present them as a tidy package representing something uplifting is understandable, but I didn't find the many broad pronouncements -- about humanity in general or Americans in particular -- convincing. Call me a cynic, but aren't the people who'd go to the booths a fairly self-selecting sample? Once in there, wouldn't many want to present their best selves? And to the extent that there are bad people out there, they probably aren't being flooded with invitations from friends and relatives to record an interview.
The beauty of Isay's project is that it's not necessary to draw conclusions from the interviews as a whole. Like the millions of inhabitants of this country, the 49 stories collected in Listening Is an Act of Love resist easy generalization. But whether inspiring, amusing, or devastating, they're a pleasure to read, and their emotional power resonates long after the book has been closed. -- Barbara Spindel
Barbara Spindel has covered books for Time Out New York, Newsweek.com, Details, and Spin. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies.
From Barnes & Noble
It's especially apt that this collection of oral histories would receive a glowing review ("absolutely remarkable… history in the richest sense of the word") from Studs Terkel, who first brought this genre to a wide popular audience. Listening Is an Act of Love is the first book culmination of StoryCorps, a nationwide project to record an oral history of America as witnessed by everyday people. The stories are as private as a family medical crisis or as public as experiencing the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Moments of time etched forever in our memories.
From the Publisher
As heard on NPR—a wondrous nationwide celebration of our shared humanity
StoryCorps founder and legendary radio producer Dave Isay selects the most memorable stories from StoryCorps' collection, creating 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 stereotype. We are our history, individually and collectively, and Listening Is an Act of Love touchingly reminds us of this powerful truth.
Publishers Weekly
Four years ago. StoryCorps set out to record an oral history of America with the voices of everyday people. This book is a collection of the most compelling excerpts from more than 10,000 interviews recorded, compiled by StoryCorps founder Isay (Flophouse), a radio documentary producer and MacArthur fellow. And they are compelling. Each one captures a moment in time-historical, emotional or personal-that make us who we are. As simple stories of humanity, each one has its own potency, with themes of family, love, dedication and struggle. In one of the most emotionally wrought stories, a father sits down with his daughter and remembers her late mother and older brother, who both died of cancer within months of each other. To gather the stories, StoryCorps provides a facility, recording equipment and a facilitator, then waits for people to invite loved ones, friends, grandparents to sit down for a 40-minute session. A copy of the tape is filed in the Library of Congress, and parts have aired on NPR. As Isay says, "I realized how many people among us feel completely invisible, believe their lives don't matter, and fear they'll someday be forgotten." Photos. (Nov. 13)
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Seattle Post-Intelligencer
As heartwarming as a holiday pumpkin pie and every bit as homey . . . what emerges in these compelling pages is hard-won wisdom and boundless humanity.
USA Today
Each interview is a revelation.
Tessa L.H. Minchew
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Library Journal
Isay (Flophouse: Life on the Bowery) has devoted almost two decades of his life to various documentary studies, firmly believing that the soul of the nation is found in the stories of its everyday people, a belief that any reader of this oral history collection will come to support. The interviews in this book are excerpted from the more than 10,000 collected by StoryCorps, a singularly ambitious oral history project founded by Isay and colleagues in 2003. Since its humble beginnings in a rented recording studio in Manhattan's Chinatown, StoryCorps has interviewed people from all walks of life, in all 50 states. Participants receive a CD of their interview, and a second CD is placed in an archive at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. In this gathering from their massive undertaking, we read the tales of survivors, trailblazers, bounty hunters, teachers, doctors, and bus drivers, to name a few. Some of their stories are excruciatingly tragic, revolving around events burned into our collective memory. Others are so sweetly personal that one might feel voyeuristic reading them. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ6/15/07.]
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