Word: terkel
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AMERICAN DREAMS: LOST AND FOUND by Studs Terkel; Pantheon; 470 pages...
...readers can now look at Carl Sandburg's epic without embarrasment. Happily, one of them is Studs Terkel. His vocabulary is sophisticated, his questions are informed by contemporary psychology and social theory. But Terkel's credulity remains that of the '30s populist who regards the American people as "a reservoir of untapped power and new astonishments...
...since he is Studs Terkel, the reservoir is always full, and the author is perpetually astonished. In Working, Terkel edited the testimonies of laborers and executives, secretaries and politicians who were too unique to prove his thesis about the degradation of the assembly tine and the anonymity of office work. In Hard Times, he set out to collect memoirs of the Great Depression and ended with an elegy for 133 voices and continuo. For his new volume, American Dreams: Lost and Found, Terkel has abandoned any attempt at doctrine. There is only, he admits, "in the manner of a jazz...
...turmoil; he knows that to address anything too close to the core will mean unsightly mess. He is too polite, too squeamish, or maybe too lazy to examine the innards, to ask his subjects to puke their guts out so he can poke around in them a little. Studs Terkel used the McPhee occupation-centered approach in his voluminous book Working; though he stuck religiously to his tape recordings, he managed, with his questions and with the inflections of an interviewer who understands, to draw out far more of the pain and slight glory of the work-a-day world...
...modest pay (about $16,000 a year), the editors claim contentment. Says Deirdre English, 32: "Editorial decisions tend to come out of what excites us." What excites them in the August issue includes a racketeering labor union, worker deaths in a steel plant near Baltimore and excerpts from Studs Terkel's upcoming book American Dreams: Lost and Found...