After lounging around to recover from my recent surgery, during which I listened to The Outsider by Richard Wright and ate Percocet and ice cream, I realized I don’t often listen to audiobooks anymore. Mostly, the issue is I work mainly from home and thus have little travel time, which was peak audiobook listening for me in the past. I’m not yet allowed to return to my indoor exercise bicycle because recovery is six weeks (I did try to ride it for five minutes and thought I was dying the next five hours). Thus, I’ve been walking around the neighborhood in 15-30 minute jaunts. If you’re only going to walk 15-30 minutes per day, choosing a 12-hour audiobook isn’t a great idea. The library will snatch it back before you can say, “This was a production of…”

Hence, I chose Working America: The Best of Studs Terkel’s Working Tapes by Studs Terkel, an hour-long production created in partnership with project& and Radio Diaries, published on NPR, that uses excerpts from an 640-page book Terkel wrote called Working, published in 1974. In the 1970s, Terkel went around with a reel-to-reel and recorded people’s responses to simply questions like “What do you do?” and “Can you picture yourself doing this forever?” The narrator the production of Working America admits that not all the interviews in the book were interesting, so this audio production is the best of the best. Originally, Terkel never intended to publish the tapes as audio works, but in Working America, we hear the tapes that were stowed away in boxes around fifty years ago. It is intriguing to hear that old grainy sound, but even better is how the interview subjects think.

A few memorable examples are a lady who was a switchboard operator that confessed to donning accents to make the day more interesting. At the end of her 1970s recording, the same woman in present day comments on what she said in her youth. She became a communications professor. Another man describes working in a factory in the 1970s, and I believe he calls it “shit.” Later, he became a union worker/rep, and his present-day interview is delightful, starting with him laughing at how spirited he was in his twenties. Again, the entire audiobook is only one hour.

A second Studs Terkel book I listened to shortly thereafter was Coming of Age: Growing Up in the Twentieth Century, which interviews folks at the end of life who look back on their working histories. The youngest interviewee I remember was in their 70s; the oldest was “99 and 5/6ths.” Both men and women are interviewed again, and I appreciate that Terkel also embraces Black and Hispanic subjects. This is not white America, but America he tried to capture. Surprisingly, many women became organizers for women’s rights, communists, and union members. I say surprisingly because not one was a stay-at-home mom. One man explained his history as a gay employee and how he organized a group for gay people. When he was interviewed for his unamerican activities, they asked if he was a communist. He said “no,” though confessed that he meant “not anymore” because he had his new gay support organization.

Both audiobooks are splendid looks at the history of workers in the U.S. with a good dose of diversity of interviewees. They are real, honest, and surprising. I highly recommend the audiobooks instead of text for the old-timey sound quality in Working America, and in Coming of Age, you actually hear Terkel between interviews introducing his subjects. Terkel has a huge catalog of works, and his recordings are now preserved at The Studs Terkel Radio Archive.