Word: terkel
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...American Dream, which Terkel's people define roughly as the ability to take control of one's own life, binds the American consciousness. For the more than three centuries that Westerners have been coming here, the promise of a better life, or at least a fairer chance at it, has been the most seductive enticement over proffered by one land to others. If, then, the idea of coming to America has faded in allure, and, more importantly, in actual worth, then everything has changed about America--and for the worse...
...LUCKY for the country, Terkel's people by and large say the Dream still lives. Not every story is happy--in fact, most have a thin filament of personal disappointment stretched across the top. But the near-universal insistence of Terkel's subject that the Dream is alive somewhere, if not in their own backyards, testifies that the nation has not suffered terminal spiritual damage...
...seriousness of his quest and the importance of its ramifications. Terkel's book never strays to meaningless platitudes and unctuous rambling. The book presents people talking about their lives; and "people," given a sympathetic listener, speak sense, not solemn pontifications about "the city on the hill." The author's selection of these people is inspired. Terkel didn't look for the "correct" ethnic or social mix--this is no Miller Beer commercial with the required ratio of three whites to every Black. He wants a cross-section of opinions, not faces...
...bitter (a traveling folk singer who says, "All the things I remember have been torn away and replaced with bullshit") to the hopeful (a Black defensive end for the Philadelphia Eagles who can't bring himself to hit the first successful Black quarterback). Just a list of the people Terkel talks to would make an interesting book: the president of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the night watchman who discovered the Watergate break-in, a rebel United Mine Workers leader, a professional wrestling promoter, a retired president of a Chicago bank, an anti-FDR Black, and ex-gun moll...
...gang member, who reformed and eventually became director of a program for ex-offenders. Like many others, he cannot achieve personal satisfaction until he has helped others; he doesn't come off at all preachy, only determined to see that the American Dream is spread as widely as possible. Terkel does have is share of individualists--a race car driver, a libertarian philosopher, a Chicago cop--but he doesn't pretend that the Dream begins and ends with them. For all that the descendants of Jefferson and Thoreau hold sway over popular mythology, the spirit that producer Abolitionism, Populism...