Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(52)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

"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.

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.

Compiled by Dave Isay, Listening Is an Act of Love is perhaps one of the most profoundly touching books I've read in many years. As I read the stories I kept having to remind myself that these are true stories told by real people.

The most touching was the 911 story in the Trade Tower. Gripping and moving at the same time.

If you enjoy living history then Listening Is an Act of Love is the book for you.

Peace my friends.

Read this, and then make an appointment to submit an interview to StoryCorps. I interviewed my dad today, and it was a very moving experience. What a great concept!

I put this book on my wish list during the holidays because I wanted to support the StoryCorps Project, but I worried that the stories might seem flat on the page. Instead, they work beautifully on the page, and it's nice to be able to re-read a line or a story. Reading the book has been an amazing, even a transformative, experience. Another nice thing about these stories in book form is that after each story there is a small snapshot of the participants. This is a wonderful book.

I love listening to Story Corps every Friday morning, so was very excited to see this book. Every story is so valuable and unique. It really reminds us how special and valuable every person is, and that we all have a story to tell.

The StoryCorps Project is dedicated to collecting and preserving the stories of ordinary Americans for future generations. People participate by being interviewed at the Storycorps booth in New York City or at one of the mobile recording booths traveling the country - they can choose to be interviewed by a relative or friend, or by a Storycorps facilitator. Selected stories are read on NPR every Friday morning and all are stored in the Library of Congress (subject to the participant's signing a release; thus far about 95% of participants have done so).

This book represents a selection of the submissions so far, and the majority of the stories are truly moving. It's divided into five broad sections:

Home and Family
Work and Dedication
Journeys
History and Struggle
Fire and Water (stories related to the attacks of September 11th and to Hurricane Katrina)

With the exception of those in the first section, the stories are universally powerful and moving, with over 10,000 to choose from, the editor has done a fine job in selecting the best. For me, the 'home and family' stories fell oddly flat, though this just may be an inability to match the power of some of the later contributions.

One could think of this as an oral version of the other NPR Story Project, stories from which are collected in the (awesome) book "I Thought My Father was God", which also deserves a 5-star rating. The stories in "Listening is an Act of Love" match those in that book in their capacity to move the reader. Although I did find the first section of this book to be somewhat weaker than the remaining four sections, it still deserves a 5-star rating.

The success of this venture is an interesting contrast with what I (in a clear minority) considered to be the weakness of the 'This I Believe' collection, which I also reviewed recently. It's interesting to me that two undertakings, which are fairly similar on the surface, should give such disparate results. What psychologists and social science researchers tell us does appear to be true - it really matters how you ask the questions...

I wondered if this book could measure up to the voice interviews and was pleasantly surprised.

I really like listening to Story Corp interviews on NPR. However, I'm not all that impressed by this collection. It's fine, but it's nothing outstanding. I just think that transcripts of interviews are not as touching to read as they are to hear. These aren't "essays," after all. They're merely people telling their respective stories, and the original medium for them doing so is a tape recorder, not a word processor. As such, the "translation" into print is not as effective (for me. at least). Also, I know it must have been tough to choose among all the great Story Corps interviews, but there were some I've heard that are so moving, and it would have been great to have those included, but they weren't.