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“... States connect their private lives to their sense of national well-being. The great divide, as Studs Terkel uses the phrase, cuts Americans off from any disturbing connections to their forebears, their contemporaries and even themselves. First and most obviously, the great divide separates the rich from the poor, white from black, those with tolerable ...”

“... find, in the two books under review, the question magnified and re-echoing, but without response. Studs Terkel has undertaken a hugely ambitious project: to encompass the experience of World War Two for a whole American generation (a few other nationalities get a look in, but the emphasis is mainly, and rightly, on the people he knows best). Liz ...”

“... are collective oral histories, of similar genre, though completely different in tone, to those of Studs Terkel in the United States, whom she has probably never read. Her main influence as far as genre is concerned was the Belorussian writer Ales Adamovich, who in the 1970s (with Daniil Granin) collected the testimonies of wartime Leningrad survivors in ...”

“... He would have done better to have left it behind, or at least taken lessons in its use from Studs Terkel. Far too many people are allowed to describe what they do (complicated) or what they think (not always interesting) at far too great a length in what looks like a careful rearrangement of their own words. We don’t get to know many people on ...”

“... can yield much interest even if they are approached in an informal fashion. Mass Observation and Studs Terkel are not vitiated by being relatively miscellaneous and unsystematic. The main quality required in the observer is that he or she should be receptive and fair-minded towards the material in question. This is a wisdom which Ms Ford recognises, but ...”

“... at all. ‘I see the United States government as a little baby brat,’ says an Indian woman to Studs Terkel in his American Dreams: Lost and Found (1982). ‘It’s a 200-year-old kid. They gave us dual citizenship in 1924. How can a little teeny stupid 150-year-old government grant citizenship to a Yakima Indian who has been here for eight million ...”

“... and among the more unexpected selections are the reminiscences of Soviet women, collected, Studs Terkel-wise, by Julia Voznesenskaya. The reaction to The Naked and the Dead perpetuated into peacetime one of the standard responses of reviewers during a war. Suddenly, everyone becomes a prig. The TLS’s review of Evelyn Waugh’s Put out more ...”

“... branch), Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow and John Cheever, had already begun to make their reputations. Studs Terkel would find his calling when the FWP sent him out onto the streets of Chicago to collect oral history. Most striking was the impetus given to the careers of black authors: Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were given their ...”

“... and the New York Times, and became editor of the Nation in 1978. Kurt Vonnegut, E.L. Doctorow, Studs Terkel and Tom Wicker are among the admirers quoted on the dust-jacket; and, as if that weren’t enough, Navasky himself twinkles out on the back flap in a checked open-neck shirt, a beard, wiry glasses, and an engine-driver’s cap which suggests ...”

“... and a radio entertainer – ‘The only thing I’m sure he hadn’t been was a lawyer,’ Studs Terkel wrote – but he was a full-time pain in the arse. He was also, as it turns out, a part-time novelist. The editors of House of Earth, Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp (yes, that Johnny Depp), describe the recently rediscovered book as ...”

“... of Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban – all that most visitors ever see.This is not a Studs Terkel study of South Africa: the characters do not quite talk for themselves. They are the people Lelyveld has chosen to interview and we always get his sensitive, wry, humane asides about them. Since it is these which thread the book together, it is ...”

“... last minute. Oral biography is more familiar in the US than it is in Britain: George Plimpton and Studs Terkel were two of its best-known exponents. In these books, the life of, say, Truman Capote, is told through the words of those who knew him: the author is editor and orchestrator. Lockhart’s Life of Scott is similar: much of the book is made up of ...”

“... after the Civil War) to ‘become a basis for a broader programme of social assistance’. Studs Terkel’s ironically titled oral history, The Good War, like William Tuttle’s recent Daddy’s Gone to War, demythologises the home front during World War Two. These studies of ordinary people are less inclined than No Ordinary Time to find ...”