Talking Terkel

For more than five decades, Studs Terkel, the esteemed Chicago jazz aficionado and radio journalist, has been blessed with the ability to elicit H not only honesty from people but often an unexpected eloquence. To date he has compiled eight oral histories, including Working, Hard Times, and "The Good War,'' but beneath the facts Terkel's subject is always the same: the soul of the guy next door. Now, as he jauntily enters the portals of Octogenaria, he offers a timely chronicle, Race (New Press). From Mamie Mobley, whose son, Emmett Till, was murdered in Mississippi, igniting the civil-rights movement, to the confessions of a former Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan who became a union organizer for all races, to the ten-year-old black girl who tells Terkel, "I might not live to be grown up—my life wasn't promised to me," they are, as Joseph Conrad

phrased it, "human beings that will bleed to a prick, and are moving in a visible world." Race reverberates with both the pain and the innate nobility of ordinary people that are Terkel's domain. He has been called a "natural resource," but more than that he is, to borrow a phrase from his late pal Nelson Algren, "a conscience in touch with humanity. ' '

RICHARD MERKIN