Touch and Go

Book excerpt: This memoir by the oral historian and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Good War is “a masterpiece about a life which itself is a sort of masterpiece” (Oliver Sacks). Chosen as a Best Book of the Year in 2007 by the Chicago Tribune, Publishers Weekly, and Playboy, Studs Terkel’s memoir Touch and Go is “history from a highly personal point of view, by one who has helped make it” (Kirkus Reviews). Terkel takes us through his childhood and into his early experiences—as a law student during the Depression, and later as an actor on both radio and the stage—offering a brilliant and often hilarious portrait of Chicago in the 1920s and ’30s. Describing his beginnings as a disc jockey after World War II, his involvement with progressive politics during the McCarthy era, as well as his career as an interviewer and oral historian, Touch and Go is a testament to Terkel’s “generosity of spirit, sense of social justice and commitment to capture on his ever present tape recorder the voices of those who otherwise would not be heard” (The New York Times Book Review). It is a brilliant lifetime achievement from the man the Washington Post has called “the most distinguished oral historian of our time.” “The master storyteller tells his own story, as no one else can, irresistibly.” —Garry Wills