Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Review of Listening is an Act of Love by Dave Isay

 
Synopsis: "From more than ten thousand interviews, StoryCorps-the largest oral history project in the nation's history-presents a tapestry of American stories, told by the people who lived them to the people they love.

StoryCorps began with the idea that everyone has an important story to tell. And since 2003, this remarkable project has been collecting the stories of everyday Americans and preserving them for future generations. In New York City and in mobile recording booths traveling the country-from small towns to big cities, at Native American reservations and an Army post-StoryCorps is collecting the memories of Americans from all ages, backgrounds, and walks of life. The project represents a wondrous nationwide celebration of our shared humanity, capturing for posterity the stories that define us and bind us together.

In Listening Is an Act of Love, StoryCorps founder and legendary radio producer Dave Isay selects some of the most remarkable stories from the already vast collection and arranges them thematically into a moving portrait of American life. The voices here connect us to real people and their lives-to their experiences of profound joy, sadness, courage and despair, to good times and hard times, to good deeds and misdeeds.

To read this book is to be reminded of how rich and varied the American storybook truly is, how resistant to easy categorization or caricature. Above all, this book honors the gift each StoryCorps participant has made, from the raw material of his or her life, to the Americans who will come after. We are our history, individually and collectively, and Listening Is an Act of Love touchingly reminds us of this powerful truth."


My Review: I LOVE this book! I love the concept of StoryCorps and the way they put this book together. I feel like I got a secret glimpse into all these different lives. Some of the stories make you giggle, some make you cry and some just break your heart. This is not only something I want to do some day with my family but something I want to participate in, if it is still running when I retire, I want to be one of the moderators. I want to travel and be a piece of recording individual's stories.
 
My Rating: I love this book and I hope many of you will pick up a copy for yourselves.  There are personal stories that will speak to everyone it this book and it would be a great book to just read a story or two a day.  I give it a rating of Four Paws and a Stump Wag!

2 comments:

  1. Wow. This sounds amazing! I didn't even know this existed. Cool!

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    1. It was very good, and I bought it a few years ago on a whim. They have few other StoryCorps collections too.

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