Much of the work that goes into oral histories remains off-screen. You can tell he’s a collegial interviewer and I love knowing he criss-crossed the US with a clunky recorder. Terkel found fit to gather the quirks of speech and images a person carries with her-the stuff that wouldn’t show up in a polite obituary. Each time I return to the book with more respect for the rich trove of personal details that might have been lost in the work of other historians. He moves from the accounts of social activists to men riding boxcars. He got there, he tracked down the voices, including those who could provide expert testimony on dust bowl poverty and White House policy.
![an oral history of the chorus line an oral history of the chorus line](https://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/38efe95f6aab264617c8aabf45e9df4597154100/c=0-192-4882-2950/local/-/media/2018/02/02/CNYGroup/Binghamton/636531897780864336-Photo-3.jpg)
Terkel created a masterpiece out of dogged legwork. I return to Hard Times for its imagery and its range.
![an oral history of the chorus line an oral history of the chorus line](https://www.musicalvienna.at/media/image/c480x285/1126.jpg)
A man who worked the San Francisco waterfront describes the scene when four jobs were offered to a crowd of hungry workers:-“a thousand men would fight like a pack of Alaskan dogs” over them. All the while the narrative moves toward and away and around the tragic, wide-eyed figure at its centre.Ĭertain images linger from Hard Times, Terkel’s sprawling account of the Great Depression. The resulting book allows for a surprising variety of tone, and ends up an account of an entire era giving way to the next. Stein used Sedgwick’s brief life to investigate both the main players and peripheral figures of the Pop art scene in New York, as well as a whole cast that connects to Sedgwick’s patrician New England roots. Sedgwick ”touched so many worlds,“ Stein once said in an interview, ”These different, alienated worlds in the 1960s-and the story is as much about all of those people as it is about her.“ Words like ”tapestry“ and ”chorus“ often get thrown around in discussions of these voice-driven books, but Edie is truly orchestral. But the brilliance of the book is in its structure and the way Edie swerves away from Edie. She peers out from the cover of my edition. Stein worked with Plimpton to produce an oral history that was ostensibly about the actress and fashion model Edie Sedgwick. Jean Stein and George Plimpton, Edie: An American Biography ”Straight from the flames to the winds, and let that be that.“
![an oral history of the chorus line an oral history of the chorus line](https://dcist.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/11/ACL-5493.jpg)
”Mud to mud, more like.“ Russ tells Blythe he wants to be cremated. ”Dust to dust they say, It makes me laugh,“ Russ says. There are plenty of high points in his epic, but I always love the way the book ends, with the gravedigger, ”Tender“ Russ, whose two budgies, Boy and Girl, drown out any bad news that comes across on the radio. In 1966 Blythe’s interviewees reflected on the great industrial changes of the early 20th and even late 19th centuries. While working on my own book, Return to Akenfield, I heard some of those old voices in council homes in the village, including when I visited an ancient rag rug picker. At the end of a particularly brutal and moving section in which an Armenian refugee offers up an account of a pogrom, Alexievich concludes with the italics. The journalist merges, even just for a moment, with the subject. I love Secondhand Time for the moments when Alexievich’s presence is fully revealed. ”She falls silent“ is a phrase repeated over and over.
![an oral history of the chorus line an oral history of the chorus line](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/5103QZQQ35L.jpg)
I can almost smell the kitchens where these conversations take place and throughout the text Alexievich is alive to the pauses, the recalcitrance of human encounters.
#AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE CHORUS LINE HOW TO#
Alexievich knows how to sit with her interviewees and appreciate that they may be strange, morose, reticent, but ultimately willing to offer a version of their story that hasn’t been drained of life. In awarding her the 2015 Nobel prize the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy said that Alexievich’s work amounts to ”a history of emotions-a history of the soul, if you wish.“ The great lesson from Alexievich is that if this history is to be soulful, its language cannot come from those who are paid to think, paid to speak, whose words are dulled by any sort of PR officialspeak.įor anyone writing oral history, this official language is death. It’s all there in Secondhand Time-not just the recent past but intimations of what the country will become. I go back to this book whenever I’m curious why is Russia the way it is. When I read her books, I marvel at how Svetlana Alexievich is both there and not there, never overbearing but present in outline in her encounters as she introduces a span of Russian voices that brings me-a resident of the west-into the memories and even the textures of the last days of the USSR.