Review: Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression

Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's hard not to love Hard Times and Studs Terkel's brilliant telling of a time whose horror quickly becomes apparent as you hear from the people who lived through this brutal time. With interviewees ranging from civil rights organisers, communists, farmers and tradesmen, as well as appearances by the likes of Senator Russell Long and Alfred Landon. It is a grand book in many ways, taking us from the streets of New York to the farms of Oklahoma, from those organising unions in factories to those joining FDR in hammering through the New Deal.

Yet, in all its grandness, this book is always personal. Intensely so. Since it is an oral history, it remains a personal history of the people. Their recollections of the times are coloured with their thoughts and beliefs. Terkel does a fantastic job of tying them together, often drawing out the stark contrasts between people and what they thought was common knowledge. In parts, one individual says that something was a generally accepted as being true, followed immediately by another who holds the opposing position. The people are always in sight, their biases and ideas always sensed if not explicitly stated.

At least one chapter was so powerful that I found myself physically out of breath at the end of it.

These were harder times than we can imagine.

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