Books: Voices of Silence

WORKING

by STUDS TERKEL 589 pages. Pantheon. $10.

"How do you like your job?" is the basic question that Studs Terkel asks in his much ballyhooed collection of conversations with 135 Americans. The not very surprising answer: "I don't." A virtuoso of the unobtrusive mike, Terkel talked with elevator operators and company presidents, yacht salesmen and bricklayers, firemen and middle-managers, foremen and farmers and hair stylists—with those few who thought they were in control, with those many more who knew they were not. The excellence of the interviews is hard to convey in...

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