Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics

( 1 )

All Available Formats + Editions

——

$9.99

NOOK Book

——

$9.99

Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines (eBook) Pub. Date: 1/18/2001 Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
$0.99

$14.00

Paperback

$0.99

$14.00

Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics (Reprint) Pub. Date: 10/28/2001 Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
$0.99

——

Hardcover

$0.99

——

Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines (1 ED) Pub. Date: 10/10/2000 Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

ADVERTISING

Overview

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

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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Catapulted to national prominence for her virtuosic one-woman show, Twilight, Los Angeles: 1992, actress and playwright Smith struck a nerve impersonating (based on her own interviews) scores of participants and bystanders in the 1992 riot following the acquittal of the police officers accused of beating Rodney King. Here, she weighs in with fertile ruminations on her philosophy of acting, observations on the daily political theater in Washington, D.C., and outtakes from the interviews she conducted for House Arrest, the most recent installment in her ongoing series of plays "in search of the American character." Soon after she decided in 1995 to take the presidency as her next subject, she realized, "I knew nothing about the president... that the press didn't tell me." To get the whole story, Smith interviewed President Clinton and former presidents Bush and Carter, as well as high-ranking political insiders (including former press secretary Mike McCurry and labor secretary Alexis Herman), members of the press (Peggy Noonan, Ben Bradley) and assorted cultural commentators (filmmaker Ken Burns, scholar Judith Butler). The resulting performances in Los Angeles and New York faced mixed reviews; while provocative, the play was criticized for lacking the dramatic coherence of her previous work (it is currently in hiatus). Composed of a series of brief vignettes punctuated with edgy verbatim monologues by various Washington insiders, the book shows signs of similar organizing struggles. Though prone to tangents, Smith is at her most incisive when probing the abiding parallels between the theater and politics. Her fans will appreciate this behind-the-scenes view of her signature technique and her unique perspective on the intersection of art and politics. Agent, Gloria Loomis. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews

From The Critics

Smith, an unusual combination of actor and journalist, puts together monologs taken directly from her interviews and performs them. Her project, "On the Road: A Search for American Character," has been running since 1980. Here is an account of her recent excursion to Washington. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780385721745
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 10/28/2001
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 320
Sales rank: 701,892
Product dimensions: 5.17 (w) x 7.99 (h) x 0.73 (d)

Meet the Author

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. In Talk to Me she 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 defiantly brilliant book that honors no rules.

Read an Excerpt

To me, the most important doorway into the soul of a person is her or his words, or any other external communication device. I am a student of words. The theater gave me Shakespeare, Molière, Adrienne Kennedy, Sam Shepard. Life would give me other kinds of characters, nestled in the speakings and misspeakings of the people that I met in all walks of life. I supposed that words could also be the doorway into soul of a culture.

I set out across America, on a search for American character. My search was specifically to find America in its language. I interview people and communities about the events of our time, in the hopes that I will be able to absorb America. . . .

After almost thirty years of my journey, I went to Washington, D.C., with my tape recorder. It was my objective to capture the American presidency in its words. The words of the American presidency are now, more than ever, mediated by the press. For this reason, I determined to look at the relationship of the press to the presidency. I knew that I knew nothing about the president, or any public figure, for that matter, that the press didn't tell me.

	Prologue: Wild Waves and Bonfires	3
	Washington, D.C.	13
	Culture Shock	22
	A Trochee in the Second Beat	35
	The Three Questions	46
	Talking to Jesus	60
	Segregation	67
	Garrison Junior High School, Baltimore, Maryland, 1961	80
	The East Coast Corridor	88
	Theater and Politics	95
	Orientation: Dinners and Lunches	108
	A Briefing	116
	Locked Up	120
	The Power of Muteness	125
	Grandpop's Nigger	131
	Slaves on P Street	141
	Creating Fictions	145
	Metaphor's Funeral	158
	Policing	164
	Swinging	179
	Theater History	211
	Performing for the President	218
	Culture Wars and Domestic Beatings	231
	"That's Not My Job"	239
	Talking to the President	241
	The Death Drive: It's the Mad Hatter's Tea Party and Tom DeLay Is Pouring	252
	Everybody's Talking	270
	A Medley	273
	Epilogue: Playing Clinton	293

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 5

( 1 )

Rating Distribution

( 1 )
( 0 )
( 0 )
( 0 )
( 0 )

If you've bought this product, tell the world how you liked it.

Write a Review

Anonymous

Posted February 9, 2001

Learning to Listen to Each Other

Some readers express dismay at the 'disjointed' nature of Smith's book. She intended it to be because she investigates precisely that: the disjointed, disconnected quality of our lives, shown mainly by the way we speak to each other. She asks: is disjointed speaking a sign of disjointed thinking and feeling? How does all this disconnection influence the governing classes in Washington, D.C.? Smith moves back and forth between excerpts from the interviews she did with hundreds of D.C. residents, her childhood in Baltimore, and her work in the theatre. Smith, in effect, invites you, the reader, to join her in trying to reflect wisely about the experience of being an American, as it was, as it is. It's a fascinating book. Go with its rhythms, don't fight them, and you won't want it to end.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

If you find inappropriate content, please report it to Barnes & Noble