Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth,
and a Quest for Faith
Studs Terkel
2001
The New Press
New York
Studying death is not a barrel of laughs. However, in
keeping with the behavior of a crackpot autodidact on any given topic, I am
constantly absorbing a never-shrinking pile of information on thanatology,
obituaries, geriatrics, postmortem legalities, and tangent issues.
As I blunder through the literature, it’s a real treat to
read Studs on the subject. Studs Terkel, if you haven’t been conscious
recently, was a maker of raconteurs. He could draw people out. Over the course
of his hour-long, five-days-a-week interview show on Chicago radio over the
course of 45 years, he talked to any- and everybody. He knew how to phrase
questions to prompt the most fruitful answer. He knew how to shut up and
actively listen.
His oral histories, such as “Working,” “Hard Times,” and “’The
Good War’” are gripping because they stand history and sociology on their heads.
Instead of analyzing theories, summarizing speeches and quoting big shots,
Studs talks to people at every level and across every range of interest. What
you get is a people’s history, from the ground up and out of the midst of
things. At their best, Studs’ interviewees make poetic flights, utter heartrending
words of insight, and just come alive on the page.
Such is the case with “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”, a
project that examines the end of life and the afterlife through the voices of
doctors, patients, activists, painters, poets, singers, holy men, students, garbage
men. Studs lets his people speak. The questions, hesitations, interruptions are
excised, and the subjects hold forth in a series of monologues. A hierarchy of
flow and meaning inhabits the path the book takes; we move from the stark
contemplation of death to thoughts about postmortem possibilities for the soul,
to ruminations on lives well- and not-so-well lived.
There are large portions on the AIDS crisis of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
It is hard to believe in retrospect that so many people lost their lives in the
epidemic, and the issues of tolerance, compassion, and political expedience raised
in these pages still resonated today.
Anyone seeking to get away from more grim and tedious
discussions of this topic will find this an antidote.