Book Review

For historians interested in understanding oral history interviews as something more complex than an accumulation of new information about the past, there is no finer guide than Alessandro Portelli. Whereas his earlier work, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories (1991), focused on the form and meaning of oral narratives, that is, the materials of oral history, the current volume pays more attention to the process by which those materials are created, as personal experience is crafted into a narrative through the interview exchange. Yet both books are similar in structure and intellectual orientation: typically, Portelli, professor of American literature at the University of Rome, explicates specific interviews drawn from his own more than thirty years of fieldwork in Italy and the United States for broad insights into such topics as the relationship between personal experiences and public events, the intersubjectivity of oral history interviews, and the social and political nature of individual memories.

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