A Pulitzer Prize winner interviews workers, from policemen to piano tuners: "Magnificent . . . To read it is to hear America talking." --The Boston Globe A National Book Award Finalist and New York Times bestseller
Studs Terkel's classic oral history Working is a compelling look at jobs and the people who do them. Consisting of over one hundred interviews with everyone from a gravedigger to a studio head, this book provides a "brilliant" and enduring portrait of people's feelings about their working lives. This edition includes a new foreword by New York Times journalist Adam Cohen (Forbes).
"Splendid . . . Important . . . Rich and fascinating . . . The people we meet are not digits in a poll but real people with real names who share their anecdotes, adventures, and aspirations with us." --Business Week
"The talk in Working is good talk--earthy, passionate, honest, sometimes tender, sometimes crisp, juicy as reality, seasoned with experience." --The Washington Post
Industry Reviews
Studs Terkel is one of the under-rated heroes of American literature: his books are unlike those of any other writer, with the exception of the British Tony Parker. His approach is to take a topic so big that it resists easy interpretation, such as work, race, the American dream, or coming of age, and then to spend months or years interviewing hundreds of subjects to glean their thoughts and feelings about it. His work is distinguished from that of more conventional historians and sociologists because he allows his interviewees to speak for themselves, prefacing their words with a short description, and editing them for sense and narrative; what emerges are short passages in which people sum up everything about themselves and the topic under discussion with power and passion. The best pieces read like dramatic monologues by a latter-day Robert Browning, working in prose and having done the research of Henry Mayhew. This is not to say that Terkel himself is without polemic or purpose: thus, Working's Introduction claims that the book, 'being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence - to the spirit as well as to the body.' Certainly, the drudgery and soullessness which this implies are at times evident in the workers' descriptions of their lots. Phrases about robots, beasts of toil, and boredom appear across the class and income divides, from farmers to models and bankers. However, as individuals, and as such they emerge, Terkel's interviewees deny this bleak outlook: a Copy Boy tells him, 'I want to be a frontiersman of the spirit - where work is not a drag', questioning the ethic of work like the spirited hippy radical he is but in a way which would be both alien and comprehensible to the Fireman with whom Terkel's book concludes. 'I worked in a bank,' he declares. 'You know, it's just paper. It's not real. Nine to five and it's shit. You're looking at numbers. But I can look back and say, "I helped put out a fire. I helped save somebody." It shows I did something on this earth.' Books about work are rare and readable ones are rarer still: Terkel's achievement in producing this book is to have made a momentous, underwritten subject, as epic and fascinating as it should be. Most of us have to work, after all. (Kirkus UK)
