All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps
For nearly a decade, the StoryCorps oral-history project has invested countless hours in the simple act of listening, yielding more than 30,000 interviews from more than 60,000 participants. Some of those interviews have aired on NPR’s Morning Edition; all are being archived in the Library of Congress; and a powerful few have been gathered in book form, resulting in two best-sellers, Listening Is an Act of Love and Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps. Now, just in time for Valentine’s Day, comes this new collection about the enduring power of love, the perfect antidote to the cynicism and fear that pervade so much of our thinking in America today. StoryCorps founder Dave Isay has pulled together a set of interviews that head straight for the heart, as couples remember their first date, laugh and joke over each other’s foibles, or express their undying love for one another. And if Beverly Eckert remembering her husband’s voice over his cell phone on 9/11 as the South Tower collapsed around him doesn’t move you to tears, you simply have no heart. --Leonard  Kniffel