Listening Is an Act of Love (Hardcover)

A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project

Celebrate the human experience! The stories in this beautiful book look at life from the perspectives of everyday people whose experiences paint a landscape of celebration and sadness, love and loss, of failure and success, and all the things that make life a bittersweet journey. Although some of the stories are of extraordinary people in extraordinary situations, everyone can identify with the hopes and hardships that these voices express. Read this and reflect on your own stories – you’d be surprised at how extraordinary everyday life can be!

Since 2003, tens of thousands of everyday people have interviewed family and friends through StoryCorps. Each conversation is archived for generations to come at the Library of Congress. Millions have heard these award-winning broadcasts on NPR stations. StoryCorps is the largest oral history project of its kind, creating a growing portrait of who we really are as Americans.

The heart of StoryCorps is the conversation between two people who are important to each other: a son asking his mother about her childhood, an immigrant telling his friend about coming to America, or a couple reminiscing on their 50th wedding anniversary. By helping people to connect, and to talk about the questions that matter, the StoryCorps experience is powerful and sometimes even life-changing.

The goal of StoryCorps is to make that experience accessible to all, and find new ways to inspire people to record and preserve the stories of someone important to them. Everybody’s story matters and every life counts.

In Listening Is an Act of Love, StoryCorps founder and legendary radio producer Dave Isay selects some of the most remarkable stories from the already vast collection and arranges them thematically into a moving portrait of American life. The voices here connect us to real people and their lives -- to their experiences of profound joy, sadness, courage and despair, to good times and hard times, to good deeds and misdeeds.

To read this book is to be reminded of how rich and varied the American storybook truly is, how resistant to easy categorization or caricature. Above all, this book honors the gift each StoryCorps participant has made, from the raw material of his or her life, to the Americans who will come after. We are our history, individually and collectively, and Listening Is an Act of Love touchingly reminds us of this powerful truth.