Touch and Go
A Memoir
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This memoir by the oral historian and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Good War is “a masterpiece about a life which itself is a sort of masterpiece” (Oliver Sacks).
Chosen as a Best Book of the Year in 2007 by the Chicago Tribune, Publishers Weekly, and Playboy, Studs Terkel’s memoir Touch and Go is “history from a highly personal point of view, by one who has helped make it” (Kirkus Reviews).
Terkel takes us through his childhood and into his early experiences—as a law student during the Depression, and later as an actor on both radio and the stage—offering a brilliant and often hilarious portrait of Chicago in the 1920s and ’30s. Describing his beginnings as a disc jockey after World War II, his involvement with progressive politics during the McCarthy era, as well as his career as an interviewer and oral historian, Touch and Go is a testament to Terkel’s “generosity of spirit, sense of social justice and commitment to capture on his ever present tape recorder the voices of those who otherwise would not be heard” (The New York Times Book Review).
It is a brilliant lifetime achievement from the man the Washington Post has called “the most distinguished oral historian of our time.”
“The master storyteller tells his own story, as no one else can, irresistibly.” —Garry Wills
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After a lifetime of interviewing others, Terkel finally turns the tape recorder on himself. At least, that's what he would have us think. Terkel's memoir is more a medley of all the extraordinary characters he's encountered through his career, from the adult loners of his youth in Chicago's Wells-Grand Hotel, to New Deal politicians. Terkel details his long journey through law school, the air force, theater, radio, early television, sports commentary, jazz criticism and oral history. Surprisingly, a 12-time author who has built a career on emerging media is a hopeless Luddite. Unskilled with his tape recorder, the bread and butter of an oral historian, Terkel modestly attributes his knack for getting people to open up about their lives to his own "ineptitude" and "slovenliness." This memoir, however, is a fitting portrait of a legendary talent who seeks truth with compassion, intelligence, moxie and panache. Never one to back down from authority, Terkel cracks jokes in law school classrooms and filibusters FBI visits by quoting long passages from Thoreau and Paine. He pogos between decades, reminding the reader that knowing history doesn't mean memorizing chronologies so much as it does attending to the lessons and voices of the past. He laments the "national Alzheimer's" afflicting this country, and fears the consequences if we don't regain consciousness. Americans might get to know their collective past a lot better if all history lessons were as absorbing and entertaining as this one.
