Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project [Hardcover]

Dave Isay (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 8, 2007

From more than ten thousand interviews, StoryCorps-the largest oral history project in the nation's history-presents a tapestry of American stories, told by the people who lived them to the people they love.

StoryCorps began with the idea that everyone has an important story to tell. And since 2003, this remarkable project has been collecting the stories of everyday Americans and preserving them for future generations. In New York City and in mobile recording booths traveling the country-from small towns to big cities, at Native American reservations and an Army post-StoryCorps is collecting the memories of Americans from all ages, backgrounds, and walks of life. The project represents a wondrous nationwide celebration of our shared humanity, capturing for posterity the stories that define us and bind us together.

In Listening Is an Act of Love, StoryCorps founder and legendary radio producer Dave Isay selects some of the most remarkable stories from the already vast collection and arranges them thematically into a moving portrait of American life. The voices here connect us to real people and their lives-to their experiences of profound joy, sadness, courage and despair, to good times and hard times, to good deeds and misdeeds.

To read this book is to be reminded of how rich and varied the American storybook truly is, how resistant to easy categorization or caricature. Above all, this book honors the gift each StoryCorps participant has made, from the raw material of his or her life, to the Americans who will come after. We are our history, individually and collectively, and Listening Is an Act of Love touchingly reminds us of this powerful truth.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Four years ago. StoryCorps set out to record an oral history of America with the voices of everyday people. This book is a collection of the most compelling excerpts from more than 10,000 interviews recorded, compiled by StoryCorps founder Isay (Flophouse), a radio documentary producer and MacArthur fellow. And they are compelling. Each one captures a moment in time—historical, emotional or personal—that make us who we are. As simple stories of humanity, each one has its own potency, with themes of family, love, dedication and struggle. In one of the most emotionally wrought stories, a father sits down with his daughter and remembers her late mother and older brother, who both died of cancer within months of each other. To gather the stories, StoryCorps provides a facility, recording equipment and a facilitator, then waits for people to invite loved ones, friends, grandparents to sit down for a 40-minute session. A copy of the tape is filed in the Library of Congress, and parts have aired on NPR. As Isay says, I realized how many people among us feel completely invisible, believe their lives don't matter, and fear they'll someday be forgotten. Photos. (Nov. 13)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

Dave Isay's vision of collecting the everyday stories of Americans is so simple and yet so powerful. Listening Is an Act of Love will make you laugh, cry and think. These stories come from the souls of individual Americans. Collectively, they are who we are as a people. You cannot read this book without feeling proud of your country." -Former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley "Dave Isay's Listening Is an Act of Love is a gift. I loved this book. I savored these stories. So candid. So open-hearted. So full of life. The StoryCorps project may well be the most important cultural event in America today. It's about us. About who we are. About where we've come from, and where we want to go. Listening Is an Act of Love is the equivalent of eavesdropping on America. Read it - and pass it on to family and friends. It'll inspire." -Alex Kotlowitz "Here are the observations and memories of a giant, diverse nation's citizens. In its sum, StoryCorps asks Americans to reflect upon their experiences, their times of travail, their achievements. In so doing, these individuals create an encompassing national narration: a people's hopes, fears and aspirations, all rendered poignantly to attentive listeners whose respect has enabled, finally, a presentation of a people's mind, heart, soul." -Dr. Robert Coles, James Agee Professor of Social Ethics, Harvard University "This book is absolutely remarkable. Listening is an Act of Love is history in the richest sense of the word, the kind that makes people feel like they count. It's a celebration of the lives of the uncelebrated. In our world today people feel helpless, but once they speak of their lives they become alive! This is what our country is all about. Never has a book been more timely or necessary." -Studs Terkel

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The; 1ST edition (November 8, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594201404
• ISBN-13: 978-1594201400
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (76 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #526,859 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

111 of 111 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars as good as it gets November 12, 2007

By Richard Cumming

Format:Hardcover

This book was published to mark the recent recording of the ten thousandth interview by the StoryCorps Project. Perhaps you have heard excerpts from some of these interviews on National Public Radio?

David Isay had the idea that he wanted to record the stories of regular folks-like you an I. He set up the first recording booth in Grand Central Station. For ten dollars you can record a 40 minute interview. Family members and friends interview each other. A facilitator is there to help out and sometimes to conduct the interview. Recordings are given to the respondents and also put in the Library of Congress with the permission of those who told their stories.

Some incredible stories are being told in the StoryCorps booths that now travel America inside Airstream trailers. Storycorps is preserving our oral history.

This book contains excerpts from interviews with senior citizens who remember the way it was in the olden days. There's a story from a bounty hunter. Another from a woman who survived a jet airliner crash in Iowa. There are the stories of people battling addictions and diseases like AIDS, cancer, and alcoholism.

There are tales of love lost and love found. A child re-unites with his birth mother. A grandchild interviews
the grandmother who took him in from his abusive parents.

Most dramatic of all is the story of a man who escaped from the 105th floor of the World Trade Center after the first tower was hit. He was in the second tower. This story will make your heart race and your tears flow. It's incredible!

What a wonderful book! Studs Terkel, our greatest oral historian loves this book. It reminded this reviewer of that classic book by Studs Terkel; HARD TIMES.

39 of 39 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Wonderful Work of David Isay November 11, 2007

By FirstNorn

Format:Hardcover

"Listening Is an Act of Love" is truly a book for everyone; I believe it is central to understanding what compassion is all about. By extension, it is clear to me that it is not just about American family and love relationships, but also about the entire human family.

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Stories of Unsung Heroes December 10, 2007

By H. F. Corbin TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Listeners to National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" on Fridays are familiar with interviews from Dave Isay's StoryCorps project. Here in written form is a collection of some of those essays, along with a photograph of the person being interviewed and usually the interviewer as well. The essays are grouped in "Home and Family," "Work and Dedication," "Journeys," "History and Struggle" and finally "Fire and Water," recollections of survivors of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, certainly some of the most moving interviews in the entire book.

How refreshing in a world gone mad with non-news of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton-- I do not believe I have ever heard either of these women's names mentioned or either public radio or public television-- to listen to and read of ordinary people whose lives are interesting, who have done often noble, unselfish deeds with no pomp and circumstance.

While some of these stories are more engaging than others, to a person each one interviewed here has something to say that touches the reader. There is an interview of a woman reunited with her son whom she gave up for adoption: "Knowing what I know now, I wouldn't do it again" [let her son be adopted]. An eighty-seven-year-old World War II veteran still sees in his dreams the blond, blue-eyed teenaged member of the Hitler Youth he had to kill to save his own life. A forty-nine-year-old prisoner in the Oregon State Penitentiary hopeful of his eventual freedom died from a drug overdose shortly after his interview. A Memphis sanitation worker recalls the death of Martin Luther King. A World War 11 veteran, when asked by the interviewer, his twelve-year-old grandson, one of the standard StoryCorps questions, what was the saddest moment of his life, remembers that while stationed in the Navy in Norfolk, he was refused admission to a movie in D. C. because he was black: "I just walked the streets crying all night, betrayed that my country could force me to fight a war but say, 'You're not a good enough citizen to come to a movie.'" Finally, one of the saddest interviews for me is that of the man who was so lonely that he got a haircut once a week just to have someone touch him.

These are Ken Burns, Charles Bukowski and Studs Terkel (who wrote a blurb for the book) people. Many of these stories rise to the level of poetry. Reading these interviews, at least some of them, reminded me of the time I saw the AIDS Memorial Quilt, another tribute to ordinary Americans, unfurled for the first time in Washington in 1987, the raw emotion, the great pain of loss but also the overwhelming sense of love and connectedness that we all felt on that cold October morning.

These unsentimental stories will warm the cockles of your heart.