Unavailable
Unavailable
Unavailable
Ebook820 pages13 hours
Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression
By Studs Terkel
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
In this unique recreation of one of the most dramatic periods in modern American history, Studs Terkel recaptures the Great Depression of the 1930s in all its complexity. featuring a mosaic of memories from politicians, businessmen, artists, and writers, from those who were just kids to those who remember losing a fortune, Hard Times is not only a gold mine of information but a fascinating interplay of memory and fact, revealing how the Depression affected the lives of those who experienced it firsthand.
"A huge anthem in praise of the American spirit." —Saturday Review
"Wonderful! The American memory, the American way, the American voice. It will resurrect your faith in all of us to read this book." —Newsweek
"An invaluable record... The talk of people who remember and those who only heard; of those who suffered and those who didn't; of those who lost everything and those who had nothing to lose; and of those who were part of the problem, those who tried to solve it, and those who were caught in between." —The New York Times
"Open Studs Terkel's book to almost any page and rich memories spill out... Read a page, any page. Then try to stop." —National Observer
"A huge anthem in praise of the American spirit." —Saturday Review
"Wonderful! The American memory, the American way, the American voice. It will resurrect your faith in all of us to read this book." —Newsweek
"An invaluable record... The talk of people who remember and those who only heard; of those who suffered and those who didn't; of those who lost everything and those who had nothing to lose; and of those who were part of the problem, those who tried to solve it, and those who were caught in between." —The New York Times
"Open Studs Terkel's book to almost any page and rich memories spill out... Read a page, any page. Then try to stop." —National Observer
Editor's Note
Reads like a great novel…
Studs Terkel’s monumental oral history of the Great Depression of viscerally simple stories from hobos and migrant workers to gangsters to journalists reads less like a typical history than a great novel.
Unavailable
Read more from Studs Terkel
Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5"The Good War": An Oral History of World War II Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith In Troubled Times Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Studs Terkel's Chicago Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hard Times: An Illustrated Oral History of the Great Depression Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Touch and Go: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Last Words of the Executed Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Studs Terkel Reader: My American Century Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Hard Times
Related ebooks
Hard Times: An Illustrated Oral History of the Great Depression Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Altered States Of The Union Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTeenage Thunder - A Front Row Look at the 1950s Teenpics Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tecumseh: Shooting Star, Crouching Panther Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVox Populi: The O'Shaughnessy Files Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThanks for the Memories, Mr. President: Wit and Wisdom from the Front Row at the White House Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsParliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blood on Their Hands: How Callous Conservatives Capitalize on Clueless Constituents Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBook of African-American Quotations Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The New Founders: What Would George Washington Think of The United States of America if He Were Alive Today? Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5One Brief Shining Moment: Remembering Kennedy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Songs Sung Red, White, and Blue: The Stories Behind America's Best-Loved Patriotic Songs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5American Legends: The Life of John Wayne Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNo Time for Glory: The Story of a Dismissed Legend Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Richard Wesley Play Anthology Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPaid to Piss People Off: Book 3 PRAYER: Book 3 PRAYER Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLast Pick: A Whimsical Warmhearted Autobiography of a Twelve-Year-Old Who Became a Great Trial Lawyer Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTouch and Go: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The American Patriot's Handbook: The Writings, History, and Spirit of a Free Nation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHunting the Dream Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Untold History of the United States, Volume 2: Young Readers Edition, 1945-1962 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5American Trivia Quiz Book Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe End of the Odyssey of the Idiots Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Mysterious Country: The Grace and Fragility of American Democracy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Civil War Series Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSacred Ground Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFor Virginia: John Wilkes Booth, Thomas J. Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Edmund Ruffin, James Ewell Brown Stuart and the Civil War Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents: Strange Stories and Shocking Trivia from Inside the White House Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
United States History For You
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A People's History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Killing the Guys Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln: A Nutty Story About Edwin Booth and Boston Corbett Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/51776 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Library Book Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Reset: And the War for the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer: An Edgar Award Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The White Album: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Hard Times
Rating: 4.0576923076923075 out of 5 stars
4/5
130 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All in all, this was a good book. I enjoyed reading the first hand accounts, and Terkel did a very good job of including all opinions (including some truly disgusting, racist ones). It really gives you a good idea of what the Depression was like. Like Terkel said at the beginning, whether every fact was true or not, or every date remembered correctly hardly matters - it's what these people remember of the time that is the true legacy of the depression.
While I enjoyed it, I also felt that this book was about a hundred pages too long. Things seemed to repeat themselves. There also seemed to be no clear order to the book - the interviews seemed to be basically in a random order.
Nonetheless, it was truly an interesting and educational book. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Oral history of the Great Depression. The 'common 'man' interviews are the best, but Terkel interviewed many politicians and government officials as well. Contains the only interview I've ever read with Topekan Alfred Landon, 1936 GOP candidate. The vitriol aimed at Roosevelt by some reminds one that every election is terrible.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All in all, this was a good book. I enjoyed reading the first hand accounts, and Terkel did a very good job of including all opinions (including some truly disgusting, racist ones). It really gives you a good idea of what the Depression was like. Like Terkel said at the beginning, whether every fact was true or not, or every date remembered correctly hardly matters - it's what these people remember of the time that is the true legacy of the depression.
While I enjoyed it, I also felt that this book was about a hundred pages too long. Things seemed to repeat themselves. There also seemed to be no clear order to the book - the interviews seemed to be basically in a random order.
Nonetheless, it was truly an interesting and educational book. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
A masterfully organized relating of oral anecdotes from Great Depression America. The author collected them all himself and they range from touching to depressing to amusing to astounding. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A bit of a slog. Less drama than I expected, less diversity (both in the interviewees and in their voices), and more interviews with the rich and privileged. As an oral history, it doesn't compare with Svetlana Alexievich's "Voices from Chernobyl." > I got out of art school in 1930. That was the proper time for any artist to get out of school. (Laughs.) Everybody was unemployed, and the artist didn't seem strange any more.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A very interesting thing happened about one-third of the way through this book; I suddenly realized it was not a current publication. That is, I was reading this book with the assumption that it was written in the early 2000s. Shame on me for not paying attention. However, that speaks volumes to the timelessness of content. Quite simply, this book published in 1970 reflects thoughts and ideas that are still being expressed today. This is a collection of interviews with people who lived during the Depression. It is a wide-ranging collection of individuals. It includes the rich, the powerless, the haves, the never-hads, the had-but-lost-its, the individuals untouched by the times, the people who worked to make things better, the people who did what it took to survive, the thieves, the industrialists, the farmers, the whites, the blacks, the Hispanics, the communists, the republicans, the Roosevelt-lovers, the Roosevelt-haters, the cross section of humanity that lived through one of the toughest times our nation ever experienced.The result is slightly disjointed and uneven. But that is to be expected. These are the actual words of the actual people. (As Studs notes in the introduction [and I apologize, this is not the exact quote – I couldn't find it after only a quick perusal] these are the people's stories. He didn't go back to make sure their information –dates, times, people – were exactly correct. He was letting them tell the story they remembered.) That pendulum swing of ideas and beliefs is both the strength and weakness of the approach. We are used to reading a narrative that presents a certain version of what has occurred. Because of the people involved, there are numerous versions that swing from far right to far left to in between to not even caring where it lands.And that pendulum swing sometimes left me feeling tired and, once or twice, bored. I wasn't sure I wanted to hear a person's tale. But I would go on and be amazed by the next story. And, as I have noted before, once I figured out the decade in which this was written, I was suddenly overcome by how little we learn and how we tend to say the same things again and again. Part of the premise of this collection seems to be to show that the nation has not learned – that the mistakes that lead to the Great Depression were in place and could happen again in the 70s. And sure enough, we took another plunge – nothing as big as the Depression, but a plunge nonetheless.And yet, I read this in 2014 and these people could just have easily been saying that the Great Depression was predecessor for the Great Recession (or whatever name we are currently giving it.) Discussions of the way banks mishandled the money, discussions of people overextending because it can't go anywhere but up, discussions of shoe-shines owning millions in stock (just replace that with million-dollar homes), discussions of the differences in the ways we treat the poor today, discussions of how it is the fault of the poor/fault of the rich/fault of the bankers/fault of the government/fault of my own/fault of anyone but me.We will repeat history because we do, indeed, fail to learn from it. But we have never plunged as deep as we did in the 30s. Maybe we learned a little bit.Read these remembrances and learn. And maybe the next time we repeat history, we will continue to make that plunge a little less deep.