Reviews

Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do by Studs Terkel

hattiereadssomanybooks_x's review against another edition

emotional funny hopeful informative reflective slow-paced

4.0

joe64louis's review against another edition

emotional informative lighthearted reflective medium-paced

4.25

samikoonjones's review against another edition

funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

4.25

mosesp's review

5.0

Studs can get a little preachy at times, and his politics do show, but this isn't supposed to be objective. Besides, who the hell else is doing dozens and dozens of interviews with working people, and publishing them for a mass audience?

andrejagibese's review

5.0

I read this book everyday on the train back and forth to a job I was growing to loathe more and more. This book really puts your life (and job) into perspective.

kevenwang's review against another edition

5.0

In the beginning. I did not appreciate the genius of this book. I thought it was outdated since it was written in the 1970s.

I gave it another chance. Wow, there are some interesting insights from a lot of the industries. It is cool to see how it evolves over the years.

Sometimes I wonder what are the interviewee doing in 2021?

adam_reads's review

challenging funny informative reflective slow-paced

5.0

lauren708's review against another edition

4.0

Long and dense and very fascinating. It took me a moment to adjust myself to reading oral histories and it’s amazing what you can learn from them.

synoptic_view's review against another edition

I dipped in and out of this tome for many years--it works well that way. You can read a couple of the vignettes or maybe one full section on a particular type of work, then set the book down for a long time until the mood strikes to read it again.

Literarily, the book was surprisingly reminiscent of Cusk's Outline. The vignettes are told from a first-person perspective, and one imagines that Terkel imposed a fair bit of authorial polish or editing. What comes out seems more like what a person would like to sound like when they are talking about themselves rather than what they actually sound like. Or perhaps Terkel just uniformly interviewed people who can routinely plumb deep truths about the human condition while speaking totally coherent paragraphs about what their job is like.

I was hoping for a bit more diversity in terms of the occupations presented. In part, this is a product of the time in which the book was written. So many occupations have changed over the years. But, for example, there are no construction workers presented. Even the manufacturing jobs are almost entirely Ford assembly line folks. It would be fascinating to re-do this type of book every few years with something like a true random sample of people.

niniane's review

5.0

I listened to the 1.5 hour musical. It is entertaining and the quotes from various jobs are fascinating.