Listening is an Act of Love

Listening is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project edited by Dave Isay, 284 pages

StoryCorps is an oral history project dedicated to telling the American experience through the stories of everyday Americans. Interviews take place between two people who know each other well (siblings, parent and child, friends, spouses, etc.) and are recorded by facilitators at locations around the country. The full recorded interviews are archived by the Library of Congress, and edited segments are aired every Friday on NPR's Morning Edition.

Listening is an Act of Love is a collection of StoryCorps transcripts, and is named after one of the main tenets of the project. The stories presented in this collection are fantastic, and evoke a wide range of emotion, from giggling amusement at the anecdote about a man's father's prosthetic leg to tearful pain at a woman's recollection of taking care of her brother as he died from AIDS. Particularly harrowing is the final section, which collects stories about storytellers' experiences with 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. But each of the stories is a reminder of the humanity of everyday people. Some of these stories have probably been told a million times within the teller's family, but they are of course new and touching for those of us who weren't at the dinner table those evenings. I'll definitely be reading more of these.