Studs Terkel: Will The Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections On Death, Rebirth, And Hunger For A Faith

The methodology behind Studs Terkel's spectacular oral-history books rarely fails to produce extraordinary results. Terkel simply interviews dozens of diverse people on a given topic, such as their jobs (Working), their memories of WWII (The Good War), or their thoughts on race relations (Race), then combines those interviews into a patchwork quilt of contrast and consensus. In his latest interview collection, Will The Circle Be Unbroken?, Terkel applies that time-tested technique to the subject of death and the afterlife, and the worst thing that can be said about the outcome is that it comes across as too homogenous. His interviewees include a few familiar names: Kurt Vonnegut, Ira Glass, Emmett Till's mother Mamie Mobley. But mostly they're ordinary people, above average only in the level of their verbal articulation. Some have been close to a great deal of death (like Brooklyn fireman Tom Gates and his brother, NYC policeman Bob Gates), while others have been sheltered from it (like stage actress Uta Hagen, who claims that at 81 she's never seen so much as a dead animal). The speakers are doctors or nurses or AIDS activists, writers or singers, pastors or rabbis. But almost without exception, they talk about death by talking about life—their own lives, beginning with where they were born, how they grew up, what their families were like, and how they fell into their careers. Often, their stories touch on the deaths of those around them, but many only directly address their ostensible topic toward the end of their few pages, and their eventual ruminations generally fall into a few comfortable, well-worn grooves. Whether they believe, as many do, in a welcoming heaven but no corresponding hell, or whether they anticipate darkness at the end of the tunnel, they virtually all deny that death holds any horrors, apart from the ones suffered by those left behind. As a result, Circle sometimes seems mildly pandering, as though it's meant to soothe an audience that's already uncomfortable with the topic. Admittedly, given the robust and complex themes Terkel's interview books have covered in the past, it's a bit depressing and slightly eerie to see him, at 89, exploring the issue of death. It's almost too personal. But one of Terkel's subjects, Chicago Project For Violence Prevention founder Dr. Gary Slutkin, seems to chide readers directly for any possible squeamishness, as he decries the difference between Eastern and Western culture: "In the West, no one has ever told me, 'Think about death'… When we touch that loneliness or fear, we immediately go to the television or the telephone or the refrigerator." Circle's many evocative musings aren't often spiritually enlightening, but they're generally fascinating, simply as a collection of personal histories, and as a modern social geography of Chicago. The book does take up Slutkin's challenge, by looking at death not only with unblinking eyes, but through dozens of them.