Overview
Studs Terkel: A Life in Words is the story of a broadcasting and writing phenomenon and represents the remarkable result of a sequence of meetings between the two supreme masters of the tape-recorded interview, America's Studs Terkel and Britain's Tony Parker. For forty years, Studs Terkel's daily radio talk show, based in Chicago, has won him national recognition. His best-selling books, including Hard Times, Working, and his Pulitzer Prize-winner "The Good War," are classics of oral history and have brought him international fame. In this meeting of the maestros, Tony Parker recounts Terkel's life story using Terkel's own method, that of the tape-recorded interview. Through a kaleidoscope of voices - from John Kenneth Galbraith, Mike Royko, and Calvin Trillin to Terkel's office assistant, his family, friends, and the people with whom he's worked - the master interviewer gradually emerges. But the soul of the book is found in Parker's extended interviews with Terkel himself. This is the first biography with which Terkel has cooperated, and in a series of fascinating conversations we come to know not only the highlights of his life but also the personality of the man who can discover the essence of people's lives in their answers to his questions.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
It seems only fitting that the great interviewer and oral chronicler, a Chicago landmark for 40 years for his radio show and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author (Division Street; Working; Race), should be the subject of his own methods. Parker, a kind of British Terkel, here puts together a portrait of the sprightly octogenarian by interviewing friends, colleagues and the old character himself. Despite his best efforts, Parker was unable to find anyone who had an unkind word to say about Terkel; the biography, as he admits, is therefore somewhat idealizing. But because Terkel has always talked about himself sparingly, there is fresh material here: his uneasy feelings about his difficult mother, for instance, his regrets about the distance between him and his son (who has changed his name to maintain that distance), the humorous warmth of his relationship with his wife, Ida, who offers a rare interview in these pages. Terkel is brilliant on the art of the interview, particularly on the skill with which he maintains his ineptitude with tape recorders. His own self-doubts, when they surfaceIs he really a writer, or just a vehicle through which others express themselves? And is his whole persona a kind of act, however delightful, compassionate and kindly it may be?hardly seem justified. This is a warmhearted picture of a man in a million. (Nov.)Library Journal
Nobody consistently conducts pithier broadcast interviews than Terkel, now nearing 85. His subjects themselves would concur, ranging from household names (e.g., Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Simone de Beauvoir, Calvin Trillin, and Zero Mostel) to quite obscure but no less certain achievers. Parker, himself a longtime interviewer, shows-via interviews by Studs, of Studs, and about Studs-why Terkel's career has transcended both blacklisting by McCarthyites and his own reticence to take more credit than properly due the mere entertainer that he, without false modesty, considers himself to be. As indicated by his books, ascending from Giant of Jazz, to the Pulitzer Prize winner The Good War to the perhaps immortal Working, Terkel has for a good part of this incredibly troubled century been steadily functioning as an oral but grandly coherent historian of the human will. Parker has put together a good summation of his life and career. Highly recommended for public libraries and academic libraries serving schools of communications.-John H. Dye, Panhandle State Univ. Lib., Goodwell, Okla.Kirkus Reviews
British oral interviewer Parker (The Violence of Our Lives, 1995. etc.) pays tribute to the master of his craft: 84-year-old Louis "Studs" Terkel.Terkel, the radio legend of Chicago's WFMT and the author of more than a half dozen oral histories (including the Pulitzer Prizewinning "The Good War," and, most recently, Coming of Age), cooperates with a biographer for the first time. Yet it might be more correct to call this work a portrait, because "biography" implies a narrative form that this artlessly arranged collection of interviews seldom possesses. Parker has rounded up 25 people who discuss Terkel, including American and English friends (such as John Kenneth Galbraith and longtime editor André Schiffrin), WFMT associates, and his wife and son. Anecdotes offer a rough portrait of Terkel's life: New York City street kid, stage and TV actor, blacklist victim, jazz lover, devoted friend, social activist, author, "radio raconteur" (Terkel's words)—really, almost a force of nature. Indeed, Terkel's associates manifest such affection that their reminiscences blur into an unbroken series of hosannas to his virtue. Repeatedly, these people praise his unfeigned interest in his subjects, his great gift for putting radio guests at ease, and his unique ability to edit interviews into the seamless whole of a book. It is left to Terkel to be the most revealing about his life: the origin of his nickname, his rueful relationship with his mother and son (who lives under an assumed name to escape the long shadow of his father), his inability to say "I love you," and his insecurity about his worth as a writer. We also receive a demonstration of his ability to listen and respond to guests through excerpts from interviews with Mahalia Jackson, Bertrand Russell, Zero Mostel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and others.
Unfortunately, unlike his subject, Parker has not learned how to induce on-guard interviewees to open up in surprising, revealing, fresh ways.