Volume 50, Number 17 · November 6, 2003
He Springs Eternal
By Margaret Atwood
Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times
by Studs Terkel
New Press, 326 pp., $25.95
If Studs Terkel were Japanese, he'd be a Sacred Treasure. As John Kenneth Galbraith has said of him, 'Studs Terkel is more than a writer, he is a national resource.' Hope Dies Last is the latest in the series of American oral histories he's been publishing since Division Street, America appeared in 1967. In the thirty-six years between then and now, he's covered, in separate books, the Great Depression, World War II, race relations, working, the American Dream, and aging. For each book, he interviewed an amazing variety of people—where does he meet some of these folks, anyway?—and the entire oeuvre has an exhaustiveness and monumentality that will make it necessary reading for future social historians of the American twentieth century.
Review, 4067 words
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