Word: terkel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...they're going to go off." Among last year's crop of six-figure books that failed to make the national best-seller lists: Jay McInerney's third novel, Story of My Life (Atlantic Monthly Press); George Bernau's first novel, Promises to Keep (Warner Books); and Studs Terkel's The Great Divide (Pantheon Books...
...Democratic Party, one who would damage the nominee as he is supposed to have damaged Walter Mondale in 1984. Jackson is the most vivid symbol of those "special interests" (blacks, women, gays, teachers, unions) that were supposed to have trammeled the Democratic Party, making it their captive. (As Studs Terkel points out, the really powerful lobbies, for gun owners and doctors and corporations, are not called special interests -- they are just average citizens, the privileged again posing as populists...
...Studs Terkel taps second thoughts about the American Dream, and Barbara Tuchman takes a fresh look at where it all began...
...Although Terkel maintains an air of bemused objectivity during these exchanges, there is no mystery about the location of his sympathies. The book's title is taken from the plaint of a black journalist: "If you don't have any hope and all you look forward to is producing more and more generations of welfare kids, you're definitely worse off. That is the big gap, the Great Divide...
...bridged? At times Terkel is overtaken by despair: "What had presumably been our God-anointed patch of green appears to be, for millions of us, a frozen tundra." Yet the author cannot maintain a long face. After repeatedly exposing the country's down side, he expresses his own second thoughts on the American Dream. He decides to roll the dice with America's eternal resource: the altruistic young. They "may reflect something . . . unfashionable for the moment and thus hidden away, something 'fearful': compassion. Or something even more to abjure: hope...