Coming of Age
Youth, so goes the cliche, is wasted on the young; likewise, it could be said that old age today is wasted on a younger generation with no sense of the past and willfully ignorant of a wisdom accumulated by years of experience. In his latest oral history, 83-year-old Terkel asks grumpily, "With our past become so irrelevant..., is it any wonder that the young feel so disdainful of their elders?" To reclaim our lost sense of history and to renew respect for our elders, Terkel interviewed 69 individuals, (including Stetson Kennedy in the chapter entitled, Whistle Blowers) who have come of age in the latter part of the 20th century. The youngest is 70, the oldest, 99. Some are well known (artist Jacob Lawrence, actress Uta Hagen, economist John Kenneth Galbraith); others live out of the limelight (a farm workers' organizer, a retired bank president, a librarian). But they all cling to life tenaciously and courageously, acting as "living repositories of our past, our history."
-Wilda Williams, "Library Journal" - with minor additions from Sean Kennedy