Customer Reviews

Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book clearly deserves more than five stars, for creating the potential for much more real conversation, cooperation, and understanding in American life.

Professor Anna Deavere Smith, actor, teacher, and playwright, has written the first totally new book on listening that I have ever had the pleasure to savor. This book takes you past the words, past the mannerisms, past the rehearsals . . . into the heart of the person. Your life will never be the same after you commune with this extraordinary American journey.

"[Actors] speak to us because they are real in their effort to be together with a very large you, the you being all men and women."

"Politicians have tried to borrow these skills, and they have misused them and ended up speaking to very few."

The duality of those extremes frame the remarkable investigation of how we all relate to the American dream and political system. Ms. Smith uses many such contrasts to open your mind and illuminate what you have already grasped from a further distance away -- we're badly divided. For example, she shows how both prisoners and the guards are caught in a harmful net with one another. This sets the stage for pointing out the same thing is true of politicians and the press.

Her most revealing comments are about "life inside the Beltway" as Washington insiders like to describe themselves. By the way, that means that the rest of the world is merely "outside the Beltway," an afterthought. I had an experience in Washington once that reminded me of that. It was the day of the market crash (down 22 percent) in October 1987. I was with a group of government leaders. No one mentioned the stock market at all throughout the day, as people scrambled to call their offices during breaks. About 3:30, one of the leaders finally took a minute to mention the fall, and to comment that government economists said there was nothing to worry about. We returned to discussing abstract policies without another reference to anyplace outside the Beltway again.

Ms. Smith has an eloquence that is impossible to resist. Consider a few of her comparisons:

" . . . [T]he incarcerated women were oddly freer vocally than the press people I interviewed, and the people who worked in the White House." "It's rare that they can reach beyond what they can identify with to feel for the other side." "The dialogue of campaigning is the dialogue of beatings." "We're all demeaned. We're all under the bed. What's under the bed? The clowns are under the bed."

We are like Dante, being accompanied into Hades by Ms. Smith, as she points out the self-poisoning, self-reinforcing downward spiral of the political process. Some date its beginning to Watergate, others earlier to Vietnam. "We are not in political theater right now . . . It is all a series of commercial breaks. And it's hard to hang on to those breaks."

As a result, there's no heart left in government or those who cover government. Without that heart, there can be no progress . . . only service to the powerful interests who can buy attention.

You will find her comments about those she interviewed (many of them prominent) to be unforgettable. You could read this book just to know those people better and be well rewarded.

After you have finished enjoying this book and learning how to hear the "heart" of the speaker, I suggest that you continue your journey by seeking out "heart-felt" authentic conversations with those you meet. With your new listening skills from this book, you should be able to reach out to feel all those you converse with.

Listen and speak with all your heart!

I measured my time with _Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines_ I didn't want it to end. I was most fascinated with the text, composed of so many literary forms: the interview, the memoir, the editorial, the description. I liked filling in the gaps, to imagine why one piece followed another, why this interview or memory right here, rather than later or earlier. I was not so interested in the "Washington" stuff, but rather how a creative mind works. I enjoyed the journey from segregated Baltimore to the current jet set life of assistants and phones in rented spaces to 'do a job.' I read out loud the interview lines to 'hear' it as it might have been said and heard the 'trochees' myself! I felt invited to read between Deavere-Smith's lines and I'm sorry to have the book come to an end.

"Speaking calls for risk, speaking calls for a sense of what one has to lose. Not just what one has to gain. Speaking calls for heart."

The real gift in "Talk to Me" is Anna Deavere Smith's small revelations about her process as an actor, writer and director. Throughout my reading of the book I found myself scribbling down her observations of language and conversation/dialogue.

She centers the book on her journey to Washington D.C. to research a performance work on Thomas Jefferson. What happens in the book is what often happens to us as writers and creators: her initial intention is shifted by events and personal truths. What Smith discovers with the aid of her researchers, what she unexpectedly finds in D.C., reorients her path.

Smith is very honest about her D.C. experiences in relation to race, reflecting on her own segregated childhood. Some may be uncomfortable with these realities and her upfront honesty as a black actor who did not get work in the theater for many years (because she wasn't "black enough" to play a black woman or "white enough" to play a white woman - this, before she began writing and directing her own works).

"Acting, the study of the authentic, puts a high premium on vulnerability. When there is vulnerability there is a greater possibility that something will actually happen."

In the end, this book really is about language and performance. I found it to be useful in my work in the theater and I recommend it to anyone interested in the creative process or interpersonal communications. Anyone looking for a memoir about her career or for a discussion of her past theater works ("Twilight", "Fires in the Mirror") would be disappointed, and I could see some not liking her meandering narrative method.

Her snippets of interviews with Washington D.C. notables and media insiders like George Stephanopoulos, Studs Terkel, Mike Wallace are a definite bonus and support her argument that the language on the Capitol is very different from the language of the people.

Professor Anna Deavere Smith promises a lot to the readers of "Talk to Me." She delivers very little. Her insights and conclusions are one-liners that could barely fill a page of print -- there is no amplification, no explanation, no theory applied or proposed for application elsewhere. The book is mostly a disjointed journal, interrupted by disjointed quotations and commentaries, and given ersatz gravitas through strained historical analogies, borrowed expertise, and insider quips.

Don't believe the liner notes. If you are looking for insights about the American presidency, or "the relationship of the press to the presidency," look elsewhere. If you hoped to better understand the relationship of the arts to American culture, or the struggles of minorities and women to America's identity crisis, you will be disappointed.

The book's subtitle is "Listening Between the Lines," but the author gives us no clue how to do that, beyond a confusing suggestion to look for "trochees." If "Talk to Me" has any useful substance, it must also be "between the lines," because it surely is not in the text. In her theater performances, Ms. Smith may very well help the audience find the soul and character of America through its words. But, this book shows how poorly the transcribed word [especially mere snippets from lengthy conversations] can capture a person's spirit, much less an institution's or a profession's.

The combination of talent and magic and connection that makes Ms. Smith's techniques work in the theater simply cannot be transfered to the printed page -- at least, has not been in this book.

I can't imagine who might find this book worth the time and effort. Any person well-read in race relationships and civil rights, political science, acting, or sociology, will find little fresh food for thought, and certainly nothing to chew on. And, those with little background in these disciplines will find a confusing shopping cart of ingredients, but no finished meal nor recipe for creating one.

I did learn a few things from "Talk to Me": (beyond Ms. Smith's travel schedule and enviable list of accomplishments and friends): (1) interesting people don't always write interesting books; (2)even MacArthur Fellows have a hard time transfering talent from one medium to another; and (3) even Charlie Rose can tout a very mediocre book.

I'd love to have Anna Deavere Smith at a dinner party, but I can't recommend her book to any one serious about the topics she purports to cover and enlighten or on a tight schedule.

This was the most disappointing book I have ever read. The excerpt on the back cover is probably the only redeeming part of the book. She proposes a fantastic idea, to get into what WAshington,D.C. is all about by talking to the top people and media there, but her book never gets past her own self-interested affairs and mundane, uneducated theories.

And she talks to such great people, but you only read a paragraph or two of their interview. To top it off, she introduces no one, gives none of their ideas and then leaves them completely.

As for the racism against blacks she decries throughout the book, Ms. Smith does a good job of being racist against whites herself, and strongly so. Does that justify her own case against racism? Hardly. At one point she wrongly attests that white and black women never could be friends back when she was a child. That would put it back in the 1960s. What an uneducated idea.

I was not impressed and only pushed through to appease my book club. Still, I only made it part way. What the book really needed was a good editor, less of her own ideas and more of those she talked to. I'm just glad I checked the book out at the library.

I had seen this author interviewed on several different forums and was eager to read "Talk to Me; Listening Between the Lines". This book has so much promise, bringing to mind the work of Studs Terkel.....and that promise is never realised. Anna Deavere Smith emerges as a "talking head" interested in putting her spin on what she hears rather than listening. There is no lack of potentially engrossing material, Washington,D.C. or the Beltway as insiders call it, a women's correctional facility, access to rich, famous and powerful....and it is all wasted. This book was a real disappointment.

I've heard this author being interviewed a few times. She always mentions this technique she uses of writing down EXACTLY what the person she is interviewing says. She includes all the uh's, umm's ... everything.

The problem is, none of the interviewers ever asks the next question, namely, why do that? What's the point?

I hate to be the person who says the king has no clothes on, but for the life of me I just don't see the big advantage of reading an, uh, interview, that, ummm, has, has, all the actual, the specific, uh, words and sounds the person, ah, says.