Studs Terkel
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.
Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.
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What the reading experience may hold
A fuller profile for choosing with more confidence—not just another copy of the preview.
Nonfiction
Use these as starting points rather than limits; the most memorable books often stretch beyond their catalog labels.
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Dark tone · Measured pace
A comfortable full-length choice for steady daily reading.
A good fit if…
Readers who want a thoughtful experience and enjoy noticing the connections beneath a book’s surface story.
This book's DNA
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Spoiler-Free Emotional Arc
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A quick reading snapshot
Edition facts and catalog signals to help you decide whether this book fits what you want to read next.
- ISBN-13
- 978-0-0025-5628-6
- Language
- English
- Edition record
- OL9210886M
A more thoughtful way into this book
This guide uses the edition details and category signals above to help you choose deliberately. It does not replace the author's work or a full review.
A comfortable full-length choice for steady daily reading.
Begin with its place in Nonfiction, then notice where the book resists that label.
Read for connection, not completion.
Mark one passage that sharpens the book's central concern and one that complicates it. That tension often reveals more than a quick summary.
Three questions to carry with you
- Whose perspective organizes the story, and whose perspective remains outside it?
- Which sources or lived experiences carry the author’s central argument?
- How does the book change the way you understand its larger subject?
Editorial framework by Wesley Bryan, BookenDeX Founder and Editor.
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