American Dreams
Kuczkowski, Richard
National town meeting AMERICAN DREAMS LOST & FOUND Studs Terkel Pantheon, $14.95, 496 pp. Richard Kuczkowski Studs TERKEL has been listening to America for years and he is not happy with the...
...the logger who laments the rape of America's forests...
...sanford pinsker, the author of Between Two Worlds: The American Novel in the 1960's, ij working on a study of American humorists from Benjamin Franklin to Woody Allen...
...disregard for rights and the feelings of workers...
...SAUL MALOFF, a novelist and critic, is a regular contributor to Commonweal...
...still rarer the ability to reveal simply, convincingly, and unrhetorically both the gloom and the faith...
...America's aspirations, a persistent background theme in Division Street, Hard Times, Working, and even in Terkel's autobiography, Talking to Myself, are the central issue here, and apart from a few yeasay ers (a D. A. R. president and a casualty of a corporate power-play among them), the speakers are sharply and aptly critical of our performance...
...American Dreams is Terkel's demonstration that that idealism is alive...
...the young man from a rich family who went through expensive schools and drugs to find God among the Hare Krishnas...
...The "non-celebrated people who bespeak the dreams of their fellows"—not childish fantasies of wealth without work, power without restraint, individualism without responsibility, and ease without effort, but immigrant dreams, populist and socialist dreams, the aspirations that fired the early labor and civil rights movements—the people who speak and organize for these dreams herald the resurgence of "a long-buried American tradition" of outspoken criticism and active common sense from the common man...
...Commonweal: 638...
...7 November 1980: 637 build a farm for themselves, and is still active in National Land for People...
...A Chicano woman who grew up as a migrant worker "learned English to fight back...
...greedy exploitation of resources...
...all his books, perhaps especially this last, help us to find ourselves, to remember and to recognize dreams worth recognizing...
...If they stir up memories of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Dos Passos's U.S.A., even at times of Frank Capra's films, and make connections to a past spirit of grassroots political and social activism in evil times, they also reveal that spirit alive today in an astonishing number and variety of embodiments...
...RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX teaches history and American studies at Yale...
...the corporate "hired gun" who worked effectively for the success of his employers and was himself shot down...
...the man who publishes Soldier of Fortune, a magazine for mercenaries . . . As usual, Terkel's people cannot adequately be summarized...
...MARK TAYLOR is Chairman of the English Department at Manhattan College...
...Terkel knows where to find America...
...was "an uneducated Appalachian woman who became the poetic voice of her community...
...the Pole who went to lectures at Hull House and heard Einstein speak on relativity...
...Conditioned toward being 'nobody,' they look toward 'somebody' for the answer...
...The composer of "Which Side Are You On...
...Richard Kuczkowski Studs TERKEL has been listening to America for years and he is not happy with the mood and posture that have become prominent among Americans during the last decade...
...The publishers of a Kentucky newspaper fight for freedom of the press and the rights of people in a strip mining region, often against the opposition of the people they are fighting for...
...used her "office" to speak out against our industrial and consumerist piggishness and called for Nixon's resignation...
...Terkel's reaction is neither a dreary documentation of this state or a lugubriously enthusiastic search for its causes deep in the heart of the American character or system...
...The poor white who found illusory selfrespect in the Klan till he discovered that racism was used to exploit both poor whites and blacks slowly overcame his prejudices and now works tirelessly for the labor movement and equal opportunity...
...To Terkel, they represent a recognition of human possibility and an immense "capacity for change...
...destruction of human-scale life, neighborhoods—Terkel's voices pin each failure down to harsh, lived specifics...
...But Terkel hasn't sought to turn reality into poetry or collect a gallery of self-portraits that feature mere variousness and typicality...
...Such positive faith amid encircling gloom is rare today...
...Instead he has artfully fashioned oral history into a kind of town meeting where "a hundred American voices, captured by hunch, circumstance, and a rough idea" speak for and of themselves—a kind of antidote for present stultification...
...Richard kuczkowski is book review editor of New York Arts Journal...
...There is the Austrian who came to America and became Mr...
...A Dialogue with Hans Kiing and Edward Schillebeeckx...
...Universe...
...These and similar voices ring through the book and compose its dominant key...
...MICHAEL ZEIK teaches in the religious studies department of Marymount College, Tarry town...
...But failure is not the final word...
...The voices reverberate like Spoon River or the poems of Whitman or Sandburg...
...His latest book is Consensus in Theology...
...They are the bedrock of Terkel's belief in what Herbert Muller has called "the genuine idealism of democracy, of the long and painful struggle for liberty and equality...
...A feminist Miss U.S.A...
...Forfeiting their own life experience, their own native intelligence, their personal pride, they allow more celebrated surrogates, whose imagination may be no larger than theirs, to think for them, to speak for them, to be for them in the name of the greater good...
...the Italian who became a Daley machine politician...
...their words must be read, their experiences pondered and compared...
...She became an organizer with Cesar Chavez, later joined with five other families to buy forty acres of marginal land and REVIEWERS Leonard swidler edits the Journal of Ecumenical Studies...
...Racism against Indians, blacks, Nisei, Chicanos...
Vol. 107 • November 1980 • No. 20
