Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project
by Dave Isay
2007 · Penguin Press · 304 pages
StoryCorps is committed to the idea that everyone has an important story to tell and that everyone’s story matters. Since 2003, this remarkable project has been collecting the stories of everyday US-Americans and preserving them for future generations. In New York City and in mobile recording booths traveling the country —from small towns to big cities, at Native American reservations and an Army post — StoryCorps is collecting the memories of Americans from all ages, backgrounds, and walks of life. Since its founding, StoryCorps has helped nearly 700,000 people across the US have meaningful conversations about their lives. The project represents a wondrous celebration of shared humanity, capturing for posterity the stories that define people and bind them. These recordings are collected in the U.S. Library of Congress and in StoryCorps’ online archive which is now the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered.
In Listening Is an Act of Love, StoryCorps founder and radio producer Dave Isay selects some of the most remarkable stories from the already vast collection and arranges them thematically into a moving portrait of US-American life. The voices here connect us to real people and their lives, to their experiences of profound joy, sadness, courage and despair, to good times and hard times, to good deeds and misdeeds. [Text Source: Penguin Press]
