Chosen as a best book of the year in 2007 by the Chicago Tribune, Publishers Weekly, and Playboy, Studs Terkel’s memoir Touch and Go is “history from a highly personal point of view, by one who has helped make it” (Kirkus).

Terkel takes us through his childhood and into his early experiences—as a law student during the Depression, as a young theatergoer, and eventually as an actor himself on both radio and the stage—offering a brilliant and often hilarious portrait of Chicago in the 1920s and ’30s. Describing his beginnings as a disc jockey after World War II, his involvement with progressive politics during the McCarthy era, and later his career as an interviewer and oral historian, Touch and Go is a testament to Terkel’s “generosity of spirit, sense of social justice, and commitment to capture on his ever-present tape recorder the voices of those who otherwise would not be heard” (The New York Times Book Review). It is a brilliant lifetime achievement from the man the Washington Post has called “the most distinguished oral historian of our time.”