Books
Reading that's relevant to Family Oral History
Towers of Gold: History of the man indistinguishable from history of the State of California
I first learned of Frances Dinkelspiel and her Great Great Grandfather during Southern California’s record rainy season in 2005. Kevin Roderick, of LA Observed, published her rejected op ed about the rainiest season ever. I was blogging the wet season, so I linked to it in my research of writings about the wettest year on record (1861) in CA. From that time, I intermittently followed Ghost Word, the blog of Berkeley-based Frances Dinkelspiel, which covered writing, journalism, and her work... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
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• History
• Personal History
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Recommended reading for hard times… Hard Times
The breadth of his interviewees and their experiences is what makes the book so good. The reader gets a good snapshot of life from many different perspectives from all strata of American society. No one is excluded. Wall Street barons and the great crash of 1929—those who got out of the market in time and those who did not. The adman who got rich during the Great Depression. People who helped to set up the Public Works program, including the... Read More
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A slave-trading story from the deep north
Friday’s episode of The Story, a public radio show about, well, stories and storytelling, is devoted to Katrina Browne’s family story. She discovered that her family —The DeWolfes from Bristol, Rhode Island— had been the largest slave trading family in the history of the U.S.
40 minutes of the hour-long show is a conversation with Katrina and Dick Gordon (The Story‘s host) about what Katrina did in response: visit the locations where the slave trade took place—Rhode Island, Ghana, Cuba. She invited members of the extended family to go, and 9 accepted. It’s a spell-binding listen.
Browne (along with Alla Kovgan and Jude Ray) made a documentary film from the trip—Traces of the Trade, which was just premiered at Sundance and will be shown on... Read More
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• Documentary Films
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Hope Dies Last
I’m not quite done with the book, but today—the day after Super Tuesday, which is also Ash Wednesday—is a good day to write about it. (I’m giving up reading political blogs for lent, a hard thing to do today, especially, since my state held an election yesterday. The upside is that posting here ought to increase accordingly. 
)
On this site, I veer away from politics and religion. Still, hope runs through both of those topics. And today, a little... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
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• History
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161 meme!
I’ve been 161’d! Moultrie Creek hit me with the meme— what current book am I reading? Turn to page 161, and find the sixth sentence and type that down. Pass it on. Okay. But oh, I’m having a hard time of it. But I’ll give it a go.
The item I was reading just when I saw this meme is something that I got in the mail today. It’s a tech paper put out by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscar people), called “The Digital Dilemma.” (I mentioned it here.) and the page numbers go only up to 74 (just like the volume that goes up to 11). So, um, what’s on page 61? A diagram. errr, okay, how about page 16? The sixth... Read More
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David Isay will be at Vroman’s Tonight
The storybooth is also in town, in Santa Monica, for the second time (Nov. 8-Dec 8, 2007). Like the first time in Santa Monica, news of its appearance snuck up on me, unawares. However, this time around the Storybooth schedule says there’ll be there’ll be a Los Angeles Storybooth, and I know when signups begin.
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Double shot macchiato Oral History
Starbucks will sell oral history book. The David Isay StoryCorps history book, “Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Lives From the StoryCorps Project” It goes on sale Nov 8. (hooray hooray, I saw that David Isay is coming to my local independent bookstore this fall. Yay!)
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
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• Oral history in the news
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Oral History as A Narrative Form
Interview with Chuck Palahniuk, whose new book, Rant, is a story that uses oral history as a narrative device. I’m glad that this interview expounds on oral history and documentary as a narrative device. This was what I most wanted to know from a local appearance of Palahniuk that I nearly made it to. Happy to see it in print here.
DF: Can you tell me why your newest book, Rant, is written in an oral history format?
CP: Pretty much all of my books find some non-fiction form and use that to tell some over the top incredible story. [Movies such as] Citizen Kane, Fargo, and The Blair Witch Project tell really over the top elaborate stories but are being made believable by using non-fiction forms and Rant is basically using a nonfiction form; which is the oral biography. I’ve... Read More
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StoryCorps book out this fall
Coming soon (okay, October): A StoryCorps book: Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Lives from the StoryCorps Project. David Isay, editor. According to book-industry watcher Buzz Girl, it is a “’tapestry of the stories Americans have been sharing from their lives to leave behind to their loved ones’ collected by StoryCorps, the largest oral history project in American history. CD included.”
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History and Journalism, Oral History and Fiction
Frances Dinkelspiel describes a conference she attended, Reconstructing the Past: Where History and Journalism Meet, which took place at Berkeley this past weekend. In some ways, it’s a parallel to the Southwest Oral History Association Annual Meeting Conference I attended in Orange County last weekend (Listening to the Past and Keeping it Alive). Not that attendees at each conference would look at the other like long-lost siblings of common interest. But I do. They both belong on a continuum in my mind.
Dinkelspiel is writing a biography of her great-grandfather, Isaias Hellman, “the Pacific Coast’s leading financier in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and his role in transforming the frontier into a modern state.” It’s a cross where family and personal history meets state history meets journalism (Dinkelspiel is a journalist),
The concluding session at the SOHA event I went to was a presentation by Cynthia Kadohata, a fiction author, who draws upon history to write her books. One book,... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
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• History
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Maps and Family History (book review)
One of my favorite blogs, The Map Room, reviews Walking With Your Ancestors: A Genealogist’s Guide To Using Maps And Geography
What intrigues me about maps and family history is a slightly different use for them—a memory trigger. The common wisdom for conducting your oral history includes the helpful suggestion, “Use photographs and documents to help trigger the narrator’s memory to describe past events or locations.” Photos are, of course, so freakin’ obvious… First as an identification of who’s in the picture—and how they’re related, and where the picture was taken. And second, as a trigger to the significance of the... Read More
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• Interviewing
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