I read this entire book in one day, my overall impression is 'Wow'. The quilt of stories that was created was awe-inspiring, I think this should be required reading for all Americans. You can really feel the love and compassion that most of these folks had for one another. I've heard a bit about the StoryCorp organization before and snippets on the NPR show Morning Edition on Friday morning. What a wonderful thing they are doing, so many of these stories would have been lost when the individuals die, but now they will live on indefinitely. ( )

Storycorps records interviews with people from all around the country. Usually family members interview one another. Stories are kept for the Library of Congress, but you can read some of them here. True stories told by real people, interviewed with love.

Documentarian Dave Isay founded StoryCorps, an organization that puts two people into a room and lets them interview each other on tape. The people at the microphones each get a copy of the session, and if they approve, another goes to an archive at the Library of Congress. Why? Because Isay believes that "everyone has an important story to tell."

The book to emerge from StoryCorps, Listening is an Act of Love, easily proves how right he is. Reading these interviews makes you wonder why anyone bothers to write fiction when fact is so compelling. A young man interviews the woman who gave him up for adoption years ago; a pair of New Orleans sewage workers describe watching the levees break, and trying to pump the water back out of the city; a steelworker describes the beauty of his work ("You see thousands and thousands of sparkles"); a man tells of the day he looked out his office window and watched a plane crash into the building where his wife worked...

Isay has big ambitions for StoryCorps: "I hope that someday the project will become part of the fabric of American life, accessible to anyone who wants to participate. I hope it grows into an enduring American institution that documents and defines the character of this nation." Me too. Read this.

This is a heartwearming, wonderful book. Read it. ( )

A friend gave me this book and said she just loved it. At first I thought of it as a read-along book, the term I use for those volumes that sit on a coffee or bedside table and you dip into as the mood strikes and time is available. But all the stories in this book are riveting. They make you believe in people again; they have a voice! In it, ordinary people tell of living through the extraordinary times of our history. I read the ones about 9/11 on 9/11 and the ones about Katrina on the third anniversary of Katrina. It was a way to commemorate, celebrate, grieve, and pray. ( )