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9781565843424

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Praise for Working:  “Magnificent . . . To read it is to hear America talking.” —The Boston Globe “Splendid . . . Important . . . Rich and fascinating . . . The people we meet are not digits in a poll but real people with real names who share their anecdotes, adventures, and aspirations with us.” —Business Week   “The talk in Working is good talk—earthy, passionate, honest, sometimes tender, sometimes crisp, juicy as reality, seasoned with experience.” —The Washington Post “Reading these stories, I started to consider my own place in the world, and understand how connected we are to one another. [Working] helped inform the choices I made in my own work.” —President Barack Obama “I cannot find words to express sufficiently my admiration for Studs Terkel’s Working. . . . Only an interviewer of genius, exploiting the tape recorder as hardly anyone else has done, could possibly have brought it forth.” —Lewis Mumford

There is hardly an interviewer, commentator or probing journalist among us who can elicit so much grief and passion, so many forlorn hopes and decayed dreams, so much of the tedium and frustration of daily existence from his subjects as Studs Terkel. Subjects? Hardly. Talking casually, sometimes disjointedly and hesitantly, or unleashing long suppressed feelings in an angry torrent, these are not clinical case studies but complex, fully human people whose humdrum reminiscences of long hours, days and years on the job are almost painfully involving. Even their laughter, abrupt and nervous, will make you wince because in Terkel's words, This book, being about work is, by it's very nature, about violence - to the spirit as well as to the body. You're nothing more than a machine. . . . They give better care to that machine than they will to you. They'll have more respect, give more attention to that machine, says the twenty-seven year-old spot welder at Ford. I'm a mule says the steelworker. Nor is the sense of waste and futility confined to blue-collar workers. Terkel talks to shipping clerks and sports figures, copy boys, hospital aides, salesmen, press agents, a doorman, a barber, a fireman, a cop, a pharmacist, a piano tuner, a stockbroker, a gravedigger. . . and yes, there is a common chord. Pride, the pride of craftsmanship is harder and harder to sustain; the old work ethic seems to many like a dirty trick. Strikingly, the only people who seem genuinely to exult in their work are those who deal directly and intimately with other people - like the Brooklyn fireman who muses You see them give mouth-to-mouth when a guy's dying. You can't get around that shit. That's real. To me, that's what I want to be. For the rest, Terkel finds the desperation is unquiet and here, at least, it's eloquent. (Kirkus Reviews)

Studs Terkel is one of the under-rated heroes of American literature: his books are unlike those of any other writer, with the exception of the British Tony Parker. His approach is to take a topic so big that it resists easy interpretation, such as work, race, the American dream, or coming of age, and then to spend months or years interviewing hundreds of subjects to glean their thoughts and feelings about it. His work is distinguished from that of more conventional historians and sociologists because he allows his interviewees to speak for themselves, prefacing their words with a short description, and editing them for sense and narrative; what emerges are short passages in which people sum up everything about themselves and the topic under discussion with power and passion. The best pieces read like dramatic monologues by a latter-day Robert Browning, working in prose and having done the research of Henry Mayhew. This is not to say that Terkel himself is without polemic or purpose: thus, Working's Introduction claims that the book, 'being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence - to the spirit as well as to the body.' Certainly, the drudgery and soullessness which this implies are at times evident in the workers' descriptions of their lots. Phrases about robots, beasts of toil, and boredom appear across the class and income divides, from farmers to models and bankers. However, as individuals, and as such they emerge, Terkel's interviewees deny this bleak outlook: a Copy Boy tells him, 'I want to be a frontiersman of the spirit - where work is not a drag', questioning the ethic of work like the spirited hippy radical he is but in a way which would be both alien and comprehensible to the Fireman with whom Terkel's book concludes. 'I worked in a bank,' he declares. 'You know, it's just paper. It's not real. Nine to five and it's shit. You're looking at numbers. But I can look back and say, I helped put out a fire. I helped save somebody. It shows I did something on this earth.' Books about work are rare and readable ones are rarer still: Terkel's achievement in producing this book is to have made a momentous, underwritten subject, as epic and fascinating as it should be. Most of us have to work, after all. (Kirkus UK)

"Praise for Working: ""Magnificent . . . To read it is to hear America talking."" --The Boston Globe ""Splendid . . . Important . . . Rich and fascinating . . . The people we meet are not digits in a poll but real people with real names who share their anecdotes, adventures, and aspirations with us."" --Business Week ""The talk in Working is good talk--earthy, passionate, honest, sometimes tender, sometimes crisp, juicy as reality, seasoned with experience."" --The Washington Post ""Reading these stories, I started to consider my own place in the world, and understand how connected we are to one another. [Working] helped inform the choices I made in my own work."" --President Barack Obama ""I cannot find words to express sufficiently my admiration for Studs Terkel's Working. . . . Only an interviewer of genius, exploiting the tape recorder as hardly anyone else has done, could possibly have brought it forth."" --Lewis Mumford"

Author Information

Studs Terkel (19122008) was an award-winning author and radio broadcaster. He is the author of Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession; Division Street: America, Coming of Age: Growing Up in the Twentieth Century; Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times; ""The Good War"": An Oral History of World War II; Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do; The Studs Terkel Reader: My American Century; American Dreams: Lost and Found; The Studs Terkel Interviews: Film and Theater; Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression; Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith; Giants of Jazz; Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Troubled Times; And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey; Touch and Go: A Memoir; P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening; and Studs Terkel's Chicago, all published by The New Press. He was a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of a Presidential National Humanities Medal, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a George Polk Career Award, and the National Book Critics Circle 2003 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

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