Division Street: America [Paperback]

Studs Terkel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1993

"Division Street: America" is the book that first made Studs Terkel's reputation as the country's foremost oral historian, as "more than a writer. . . a national resource," in the words of John Kenneth Galbraith. Indeed, the people in Division Street were so compelling that Terkel revisited many of them for his recent bestseller, Race, showing how their opinions had changed and their prejudices had grown in the intervening decades.

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

Totally absorbing.

Review

Here in their own words are the testimonies of the winners and losers, the strugglers and the defeated, the hopeful and the despairing. . . Each of them, like each of us, is a cross-section of all that is contained in humanity. -- Chicago Tribune

Remarkable. . . Division Street astonishes, dismays, exhilarates. -- The New York Times

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Product Details

• Paperback: 381 pages
• Publisher: New Press, The (April 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565840755
• ISBN-13: 978-1565840751
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,202,851 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Studs Terkel (1912-2008) was a free spirit, an outspoken populist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a terrible ham, and one of the best-loved characters on the American scene. Born in New York in 1912, he lived in Chicago for over eight decades. His radio show was carried on stations throughout the country.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Carl Sandburg's Chicago, May 29, 2003

By 

A.Trendl HungarianBookstore.com "What should ... (Glen Ellyn, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Division Street: America (Paperback)

Chicago is the city of big shoulders. Carl Sandburg said that. Studs Terkel, in "Division Street: America," gives us the names of those people on whom those big shoulders rest. Like Edgar Lee Masters' collection of poetic epitaphs, "Spoon River Anthology," Terkel titles each chapter with the name of those whose lives are being described.

Division Street runs East-West through Chicago, ending at Lake Shore Drive. It is a major road, and Terkel could've chosen any avenue to name his book. What is important is that it cuts through the center of the city, and, symbolically, into and through the heart of it all.

Each story is a page or two. Some are five or six pages. None are too long. Terkel knows when to finish the story. However, to call the short chapters 'stories' isn't really accurate. They are edited conversations with people you might have known if you lived in Chicago in 1967 when this was first published. Some of the people are cops. Others are teachers, cabbies and nuns. There is even a couple CEOs and advertising guys. Terkel manages to connect with each interviewee, and allow them to do the talking.

Everything you've heard about Studs Terkel or this book is true. It is fantastically voyeuristic, and terrifically revealing without ever being cheap or exploitive. These people are so familiar, as if you overheard Terkel chatting with them at a diner or coffeehouse.

I wholeheartedly recommend "Division Street: America" by Studs Terkel.

Anthony Trendl
editor, HungarianBookstore.com

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of his better sets of interviews, October 5, 2004

By 

M. Hogan (Midwest) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Division Street: America (Paperback)

"Division Street: America" isn't the first title that would pop into most people's minds when they think of Terkel, but I think it should be. I'll admit, I'm totally biased being in Chicago, but maybe that's the best way to read this book.
There is a lot of upheaval and suffering throughout the city due partly to the constantly changing demographics of the neighborhoods, and many of the ethnic pockets and pyschological ghettoes that Terkel talked to people in during 1967 were in the middle of those changes. From the near north area, tight in the protective grip of Mayor Daley to the old Eastern European neighborhoods of the north and west sides which would soon become almost purely Puerto Rican, Cuban and Mexican.
You can really see firsthand, how stupid, how intelligent, how altruistic and how mean people can be in a big city. That's the best part of this whole book: you're left at every page feeling that something monumental is taking place in urban America while the interviews are happening. Civil rights, white flight, Latin immigration, the decline of the manual labor factory job, Viet Nam, etc.
Reading this in 1967 must have been interesting, but knowing what we know about Chicago today and how it's still in a state of flux (and maybe always will be) is really a reason to go back. The problems, the people and the strange mix still exists throughout Division Street today; but thanks to Terkel, we have a little hindsight.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Look at Chicago & USA, February 4, 2010

By 

K.A.Goldberg (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Division Street: America (Paperback)

This early effort stands with the best oral histories by author/radio host Stud's Terkel. In the mid-1960's Terkel took his tape recorder and let dozens of ordinary Chicagoans open up. Showing our City's diversity and divisions, we hear from executives, laborers, teachers, factory hands, social workers, rich, poor, and middle-class. Many are white, others are black ("Negro") or Latino, and they range from young swingers, to stressed-out parents, to aged retirees. Nearly all offer engaging tales, views, and outlooks. Among the major issues are life in Chicago, work, racial tensions, Vietnam, worship, Martin Luther King, the Bomb, opportunity, and (President) Lyndon Johnson. Anton Faber describes tool-and-die making in The Kaiser's Germany and then Chicago after arriving in 1912. Eva Barnes recalls coal miners, teen marriages, and bootlegging in her small town, plus working in Chicago's once-vast stockyards. Janice Majewski and her colleagues describe teaching at Marshall High School, then as now one of our city's more troubled facilities. Luci Jefferson arrived seeking work in the Great Migration of Southern Blacks, while activist Florence Scala fought City Hall. Many support the elusive goal of racial reconciliation, others nervously sense the decline of the traditional factory economy (replaced by white-collar services). As with many later Terkel efforts, the interviewees lean more left than right, with definite strains of anti-establshment sentiment - even among some we'd labed as distinctly "establishment."

Studs Terkel (1912-2008) made his mark by letting his subjects do the talking, and readers are better off for it. I'd have liked to hear from even more persons, plus those then fleeing to suburbia due to racial fears - what greater division existed both then and today? Still, this stellar book is as worth reading as many later Terkel efforts like HARD TIMES, WORKING, AMERICAN DREAMS, COMING OF AGE, etc.