Books Studs Terkel
posted by on October 31 at 14:29 PM
Dead at 96. I wish he’d lived to see the results of this election, but I know his work will inspire writers to do good work for a very long time to come.
He was one of the best, and one of the last, of his kind: a journalist who understood that standing up for what you believe in is the best thing you can do with your journalism. I’m going to go home tonight and spend some quality time with my battered copy of Working. It’s just so goddamned sad, is what it is.
You know what? I'm not sad. He got 96 years, which is a hell of a long time, and he left a fantastic legacy. He'll be remembered forever for Working and all the rest. He gave a lot, and he had a great, fulfilled, fulfilling long life. We all should be so lucky. They stopped making guys like Studs fifty years ago or more. Rest well, man.
Chicago Public Radio will no doubt be cranking out some excellent rememberances in the days to come: ChicagoPublicRadio.org Nothing up yet, though.
Yes, you should read it.
Because SLOG is the anti-thesis of Studs Terkel -- an imposition of elite values and a pandering to the bureaucratic power structure.
Wouldn't you rather watch Working Girl? Books are for people who can't watch movies.
I'm really glad I got to see him speak, once upon a time. So many of his books are classics, but I'm still partial to "Giants of Jazz," in which he interviewed not ordinary Americans, but Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. I'm gonna see Charlie Haden at Town Hall tonight and fondly remember Mr. Terkel.
I hear you, Fnarf, but I'm still sad. He was America.
Studs used to ride my bus, the Sheridan Park run. He'd sit in back and yak with whoever sat by him. My favorite book of his is "The Spectator," accounts of his interviews with an astonishing range of performers whose work he had come to know intimately before meeting them. He was both erudite and completely accessible in describing how his encounters with their work shaped his perceptions of beauty and of being human, of work and love and duty. Shivers.
KUOW will run a one-hour interview with Studs Terkel tonight at 8 p.m.
The Sun-Times finally gets to use the obituary they had penned out in the early 1980's.
I read "The Good War" over the summer. I thought he already died a year ago.
RIP, Studs. RIP.
What kind of God silences a voice like this so soon?
A giant has checked out.
RIP
I'm a little embarrassed to admit I've never read any of his stuff, but I *almost* picked up one at the bookstore the other day. Now I'll have to go do that for real. Is Working the best bet to start with?
cdc, here's an easier place to start if you like. It has a good Terkel flavor, and starts with his reflection on his wife's passing after they had sixty years together.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200110/terkel
Hope Dies Last
I do feel sad whenever one of the Chicago greats dies. I cried when Bill Veeck & Mike Royko died, and Studs is one of the great humanists of this or any time.
I fell in love with his voice, and his heart, when I first heard him on the radio.
I'd like to bring that much decency and authenticity into my own voice, before I die. Even if I have to fake it.
As a young teen, living in the greater Chicago area, sometimes it just got too damn hot during a summer day to do much outside.
And in my air-conditioned parents' home, I learned about two things. One was the foreign movies the local PBS station, WTTW, ran at lunchtime, and the other was Studs' interviews, which I believe were on WFMT.
Both were a revelation.
I still have a copy of his Hard Times, about the Great Depression, bought from a lady who ran a used bookstore in the basement of her home on the old Route 49 between Valparaiso and Chesterton, Indiana. The inside cover lists, in longhand, the real identities of two of the people interviewed for the book.
Enjoy where you're going next, Studs - not that I need to tell you to do that.
We'll miss you.
RIP, Studs...
He was great.
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