Coming of Age; The Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It

New York: The New Press, 1995. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 24 cm. xxvi, 468, [2] pages. Footnotes. References. Inscribed by the author on half-title page. Louis "Studs" Terkel (May 16, 1912 - October 31, 2008)[1] was an American author, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for The Good War and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago. Terkel was acclaimed for his efforts to preserve American oral history. For Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, Terkel assembled recollections of the Great Depression that spanned the socioeconomic spectrum, from Okies, through prison inmates, to the wealthy. In 1997, Terkel was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Two years later, he received the George Polk Career Award in 1999. Derived from a Kirkus review: Oral historian Terkel, himself an active octogenarian, leads a chorus of 68 senior citizens who vow not to go gentle into that good night. The accent, as in Terkel's Working, is on careers rather than personal lives. For his subjects, who range in age from 70 to 99, Terkel, an unreconstructed liberal, chose mostly kindred rebel spirits: e.g., John Kenneth Galbraith, Congressman Henry Gonzalez, labor leader Victor Reuther, and pioneering gay liberationist Harry Hay. These men and women are eyewitnesses to the social tumult of this century: civil-rights struggles, environmental catastrophe, war, poverty, sexual revolution, and McCarthyism. Many focus on youthful struggles, like Genora Johnson Dollinger, who recalls how, as a 23-year-old, she mounted a union sound truck during the 1937 Flint sit-down strike against GM. Concerns here include the role of technology, the historical amnesia and scary future of the young, ethnic and class divisions, and, the toll that age has taken on their health.