“Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from the StoryCorps”
By Dave Isay
The Penguin Press, 190 pages, $21.95
“We want to encourage the entire nation to take the time to ask life’s important questions to a loved one — or even a stranger,” explains Dave Isay, “and really listen to the answers.” Isay, the founder of StoryCorps, an oral history project founded in 2003, works in the tradition of Studs Terkel, one that is dedicated to the radical act of listening to the words and ideas of others. StoryCorps has collected more than 50,000 interviews, and while some are heard on NPR, most are preserved in the Library of Congress. This thematically arranged collection, following the earlier “Listening Is an Act of Love,” bursts with stories that are unvarnished, sad, funny, wise and, most of all, very real.