The Curious Autodidact

In the precious tradition of Studs Terkel , within days of the September 11th tragedy the Columbia University Oral History Research Office deployed a team to interview people in New York City.

For the tenth anniversary The New Press has published a stunning selection of these interviews that took place initially and in the years following in the book After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 2001 and the Years After.This book deserves special attention amid a field of others. Although we have heard from many people who lost family members in this attack, here you will hear from the blind woman who ran a candy shop in a nearby building lobby, artists who lived in Tribeca, and other people whose perspectives you likely didn’t get to hear from before and if you did likely it wasn’t in their own words allowed to breath and come alive with emotion. Here selected interviews have been distilled and are presented in their own words and you will learn things you didn’t know previously even if you have read other books. It’s easy to visualize what the editors plowed through to come up with the brilliant selection that is presented here, they had over 900 hours of interviews to choose from.

If you aren’t familiar with Studs Terkel‘s work I’d recommend listening to Hearing Voices piece about him called Working With Studs it gives you a taste of this man who spent his life listening to those who are rarely featured and presenting them in their own words. He is perhaps the most famous for his book Working published back in 1974.