Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Shop the sale
In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowTouch and Go
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreAt nearly ninety-five, Studs Terkel has written about everyone's life, it seems, but his own. In Touch and Go, he offers a memoir that—embodying the spirit of the man himself—is youthful, vivacious, and enormous fun.
Terkel begins by taking us back to his early childhood with his father, mother, and two older brothers, describing the hectic life of a family trying to earn a living in Chicago. He then goes on to recall his own experiences—as a poll watcher charged with stealing votes for the Democratic machine, as a young theatergoer, and eventually as an actor himself in both radio and on the stage—giving us a brilliant and often hilarious portrait of the Chicago of the 1920s and 1930s. He tells of his beginnings as a disc jockey after World War II and as an interviewer and oral historian—a craft he would come to perfect and indeed personify. Finally, he discusses his involvement with progressive politics, leading inevitably to his travails during the McCarthy period, when he was blacklisted and thrown out of work despite having become by then one of the country's most popular television hosts.
Fans of Studs Terkel will find much to discover in these remarkable reminiscences. Others will be captivated to learn of the unique and eclectic life of one of America's greatest living legends.
Sydney Lewis is the author of three oral histories and transcribes for and otherwise assists oral history maestro Studs Terkel. She has edited award-winning radio essays for WBEZ radio in Chicago and written for Chicago Tribune Magazine. In the 1980s, she was an administrative assistant in WFMT radio's program department. She currently works at Atlantic Public Media as a producer of Sonic Ids for Atlantic Public Media and NPR stations WCAI and WNAN, and she is the editor of the Transom Review at Transom.org.
Born in 1912, Studs Terkel grew up in Chicago. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932 and from the University of Chicago Law School in 1934. He was an actor in radio soap operas, a disk jockey, a radio commentator, and a television emcee, and he traveled all over the world doing on-the-spot interviews. He also hosted a daily radio program on WFMT in Chicago that was syndicated throughout the country. He is the author of American Dreams: Lost and Found; Working; Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression; Division Street: America Giants of Jazz; and Talking to Myself. He died on October 31, 2008.
Norman Dietz is a writer, an actor, and a solo performer. Since 1962, he has toured coast to coast, presenting his work before audiences all over the United States and Canada. He is the author of the comic novel Nailing It, as well as Fables & Vaudevilles & Plays and The Lifeguard and the Mermaid, collections of his work for the stage. Norman has also performed frequently on radio and television, and he has recorded over 150 audiobooks, many of which have earned him awards from AudioFile magazine, the ALA, and Publishers Weekly. Additionally, AudioFile named Norman one of the Best Voices of the Century. He lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.