Word: terkel
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...SELECTING the subject of his latest book, Studs Terkel asks a question of agonizing, perhaps even dangerous, consequence. Terkel wants to know about that fundamental, if undefinable American truism, the American Dream. Terkel, of course, asks what the Dream is, but that is not and has never been the most important issue about this curious and wonderful native invention. The vital question is whether the Dream still exists...
...style, Terkel lets others answer the question for him. Those who lived through the Depression told their story in Hard Times; assorted laborers talked about what they did for a living in Working. In American Dreams, Terkel achieves the extraordinary goal for constructing a book with vivid theme without writing more than a few paragraphs of text. Again, his people supply the words, but Terkel's marvellously aggressive listening and sensitive editing combine to form a lush, almost overgrown book about Americans and their dreams...
Miguel Cortez, a middle-aged Cuban refugee, recalls the early days of Castro. When Terkel asks him if he could bribe a policeman after the revolution, Cortez encapsulates an entire mind of state: "No, because everybody a cop." Cortez's dream is simply to rise upon his failures-a vision not substantially different from Ted Turner's: "I never was valedictorian. I couldn't make the football team, I couldn't make the baseball team . . . That's kinda how I got into sailing...
...Terkel's subjects believe that whining is everything. "I learned that success is a two-edged sword," complains a sophomoric ex-professor. "There's a cost . . . I discovered in the hardest way possible that I had let other people tell me what my values were." A fight promoter, angry at newspaper attacks, decides that "a certain elite has decided that wrestling does not belong as a respectable sport in this country . . . I think it's a black day . . . There is no American Dream. It's a hype, an elusive nothing." A hyperactive executive regards zero growth...
Doubtless another interviewer might find subjects who are not so graceful, people embittered or trivialized by circumstance. But no other interviewer has Terkel's ability to elicit such deep response; and no one can duplicate his fundamental faith in the general-and specific-public. In American Dreams that belief is ratified by a multitude who prefer enlightenment to opulence and stability to success. In So Long!, Walt Whitman boasted, "This is no book,/ Who touches this touches a man." Who touches the book of American Dreams touches not one but a hundred men and women and, by implication, millions...