Division Street: America

This is my book club selection for discussion next week and I'm totally enjoying it. I like the dialogue from different individuals and its a true depiction of Chicago at that time. I'm from Chicago so it is truly interesting to me.

Terrific book

it is studs telling it like it was a must read for studs fans

Not as good as the later books.

Great product. Fast service

Chicago is the city of big shoulders. Carl Sandburg said that. Studs Terkel, in "Division Street: America," gives us the names of those people on whom those big shoulders rest. Like Edgar Lee Masters' collection of poetic epitaphs, "Spoon River Anthology," Terkel titles each chapter with the name of those whose lives are being described. Division Street runs East-West through Chicago, ending at Lake Shore Drive. It is a major road, and Terkel could've chosen any avenue to name his book. What is important is that it cuts through the center of the city, and, symbolically, into and through the heart of it all. Each story is a page or two. Some are five or six pages. None are too long. Terkel knows when to finish the story. However, to call the short chapters 'stories' isn't really accurate. They are edited conversations with people you might have known if you lived in Chicago in 1967 when this was first published. Some of the people are cops. Others are teachers, cabbies and nuns. There is even a couple CEOs and advertising guys. Terkel manages to connect with each interviewee, and allow them to do the talking. Everything you've heard about Studs Terkel or this book is true. It is fantastically voyeuristic, and terrifically revealing without ever being cheap or exploitive. These people are so familiar, as if you overheard Terkel chatting with them at a diner or coffeehouse. I wholeheartedly recommend "Division Street: America" by Studs Terkel. Anthony Trendl editor, HungarianBookstore.com

I just reread this book as a kind of wake to Terkel after his passing. I first read it in my mid-twenties and was completely absorbed. Now, almost twenty years later, I've just finished it alongside Joseph P. Lash's "Franklin and Eleanor" and I'm fascinated by how topical both books seem as Obama prepares to take office amid economic catastrophe, internal homeland strife, and war. The '30s, the late '60s, and our times seem like stepping-stones in history, so similar in revolutionary content: forward-thinking, transformative and yet violent and painful. Yet the differences are clear, too. Depression-era policies focused just to establish social programs; civil rights had to wait 'til another day. That day emerged during the time covered by "Division Street," which reveals how far from black-and-white those issues were even to people who felt strongly about them. Time and again as I read I thought, this book was written forty years ago...some of these people must still be alive. What do they think now? And that question begged another: What will we think in forty years? If for no other questions than these, "Division Street" is abundantly worth reading. It's a true American classic--the voice of her people.

if you don't love this book, check your heart because you may have no soul!!!