Reviews for American Dreams

The average rating for American Dreams based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-12-13 00:00:00 Yolo Yolov Update Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the U.S. Thanks to the magic of the internet, I found a transcript of the C.P. Ellis story I described below. Too bad the current occupant of the White House doesn't have the intellectual capacity or interest to read it. Click here to read should you be interested. Original Review American Dreams: Lost and Found had a profound effect on me when I first read it as a high school student and still does. When I was a young teacher at private schools we didn't recognize Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so as a form of subtle protest, I would read a selection from this book to every one of my classes, every year. The selection was about C.P. Ellis, a janitorial custodian at Duke University. Ellis was raised in a poor, white, segregated rural North Carolina and struggled to make a living. He was always living on the edge of financial ruin and struggled to raise his family. Eventually he became prominent in the local Ku Klux Klan and earned enough to run a gas station. On the day that Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, his friends gathered at the station and drank to celebrate that "that son of a bitch was dead." In the next few years his station failed and he got a job as a janitor at Duke. Soon he became active in workers' rights and union activities and was forced to work with blacks on collective bargaining issues, something he hated doing. But over time, he learned that there wasn't much separating him and them. They were trying to survive and live a good life just like him. They had similar interests. He found himself becoming distant from his former friends and becoming friends with one of his fellow committee members, "that big black gal, Ann Atwater." By being exposed to other people, Ellis learned what it meant to live the American Dream. When one of my former students, who attended Duke, came back to visit with me, he told me of attending a public lecture and sitting next to a man he later learned was C.P. Ellis. It was one of the most memorable moments of my short teaching career. I never met Ellis, but through Terkel's account, I felt close to him. Terkel tells stories about people in ways that elevate the human condition. They are unique and everlasting. The stories in this book are part of Terkel's gift to us all.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-10-12 00:00:00 Bradley Ecker There's a lot of talk these days about getting outside of our political bubbles, learning to empathize with the "other side," and keeping a real eye on the pulse of the "real" America. But this contemporary yearning for "conversation" feels so shallow when compared to what Studs Terkel does here. This book is not about uncovering some truth of political science, or explaining someone's contradictory presidential vote. Instead, it's about slicing open a larger and deeper vein of this country, one that touches on slavery and the Depression and the Wobblies and the colonization of North America. And this book does this with so little pretension and so much love that it's easy to get inside the head of almost every interviewee. What you find there in the other's shoes will be different from what I found, but I'm almost sure it will change you.