Talk to Me Listening Between the Lines

Name: Talk to Me Listening Between the Lines
Price: 2.54 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9780375501500

ISBN-10: 0375501509

ISBN-13: 9780375501500

Edition: 2000

Authors: Anna Deavere Smith

List price: $24.95

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Description:

Anna Deavere Smith, the award-winning playwright and actor, has spent a lifetime listening—really listening—to the people around her. As a child in the segregated Baltimore of the early 1960s, Smith absorbed the words of her parents, teachers, neighbors—even train conductors—and realized that there was something more being communicated than the actual words: The conductor's voice had a mild kind of grandeur that was a cousin to the vocal tones I had heard at funerals—"Ashes-to-ashes"—and at christenings and weddings. These are words that have been said many times, but the person who speaks them understands that each time it must be said as if it matters, because it does matter. We never… know what lies ahead, and we never know what just happened, and all words must house respect of those two unknowns. In Talk to Me, Smith looks back at a singular career as a seeker and interpreter of language in America, revealing the methodology behind her extraordinary search for the truth and nuances of verbal communication. For thirty years, the defining thesis of Smith's work has been that how we speak is just as important in communicating truth and identity as what we say. Everything from individual vocal tone to grammar, Smith demonstrates, can be as identifiable and revealing as a fingerprint. Her journey has taken her from the rarefied bastions of academia to riot-torn streets; she has conducted hundreds of interviews with subjects ranging from women prisoners to presidents of the United States. In 1995, her ongoing investigation led her to Washington, D.C. After all, what better place to wage an inquiry into the power of language and the language of power than in the city where "message" is a manufactured product? What happens when we as citizens accept—which we seem to be doing more and more—our chosen leaders' failure to tell the truth? And how can we know that we are hearing what Washington really has to say when everything we receive is filtered through the media? Armed with a blazing intellect and a tape recorder, Smith tackled these questions head-on, conducting more than four hundred interviews with people both inside and outside the power structure of Washington. She recorded these sessions in her trademark verbatim transcripts, which include every tic and verbal utterance of her subjects. More than thirty of these remarkable documents appear in this book, including interviews with Bill Clinton, Anita Hill, Studs Terkel, George Bush, Mike McCurry, and Helen Thomas. After five years of searing investigation into the world of the politicians, spin doctors, and power brokers who are steering the course of our country from inside the beltway, Smith has come away with a revelatory assessment—by turns devastating and hopeful—of the lexicon of power and politics in America. Talk to Me is a landmark contribution from a woman whose pioneering insights into language speak volumes.

Book details

List price: $24.95
Copyright year: 2000
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 10/10/2000
Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 320
Size: 6.75" wide x 10.00" long x 1.25" tall
Weight: 1.342
Language: English

Playwright, actress, teacher, Anna Deavere Smith is most of all a listener. For years she has created unique art by listening more closely than others, listening with the belief that language and character are inextricably bound. InTalk to Meshe listens in search of America. Smith's goal is to discern the American character and to capture its politics. To that end she travels everywhere from the site of recent church burnings in rural Alabama to the presidential conventions of 1996, from the segregated Baltimore of her childhood to the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women. And along the way she interviews everyone from Studs Terkel to President Bill Clinton himself. The result is a…



Prologue: Wild Waves and Bonfires


Washington, D.C.


Culture Shock


A Trochee in the Second Beat


The Three Questions


Talking to Jesus


Segregation


Garrison Junior High School, Baltimore, Maryland, 1961


The East Coast Corridor


Theater and Politics


Orientation: Dinners and Lunches


A Briefing


Locked Up


The Power of Muteness


Grandpop's Nigger


Slaves on P Street


Creating Fictions


Metaphor's Funeral


Policing


Swinging


Theater History


Performing for the President


Culture Wars and Domestic Beatings


"That's Not My Job"


Talking to the President


The Death Drive: It's the Mad Hatter's Tea Party and Tom DeLay Is Pouring


Everybody's Talking


A Medley


Epilogue: Playing Clinton