The Norton Book of Interviews: An Anthology from 1859 to the Present Day

by Gay Talese (Foreword), Christopher Silvester (Editor)

A collection of interviews with some of history's most prominent people includes discussions with Brigham Young, Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, Marilyn Monroe, Jimmy Hoffa, Al Capone, and Mussolini.

Genres: Nonfiction

652 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Gay Talese is an American author. He wrote for The New York Times in the early 1960s and helped to define literary journalism or "new nonfiction reportage", also known as New Journalism. His most famous articles are about Joe DiMaggio, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.

Reviews

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the true history, of men and women confiding their most intimate thoughts to professional strangers, AKA reporters and correspondents from the XIX century until the end of the XX. Naturally, dictators make for the most fascinating of interview subjects. Some pearls: Interviewer: Why do you call yourselves National Socialists when your program has nothing to do with socialism? Adolf Hitler: We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We are socialists in as much as our German ancestors held some lands in common. We are not internationalists.
Interviewer (Emil Ludwig): Everywhere I travel in Russia I find a great sense of dread. Josef Stalin: You are mistaken, but your mistake is widely belied in the West. Could the Bolshevik regime have survived solely on the basis of fear? Ludwig: Why not? It kept the Romanovs in power for over 300 years.
Interviewer: Do you see many of your comrades from the early days of the Fascist Party? Mussolini: No. A man in my position cannot afford to have friends. If, by accident, I meet an old comrade it is embarrassing for both of us.
Don't discount capitalist politicians, though. Interviewer, speaking to John F. Kennedy in 1960: Would you take a much stronger position against McCarthyism than in the past? JFK: Well, if you're talking about the technique, I don't agree with it, nor did I ever. Of course, John. That's why you voted "absent" when McCarthy was censured by the Senate.
Other joys in this collection range from Tallulah Bankhead, "I haven't had a man in six months. I feel grouchy" to Samuel Beckett, "Joyce thought of the author as omniscient, God the Father. I saw such a perspective was no longer possible, so I was left with the debris of history".
Bismark, Marx, Twain, Nikita Kruschev and Evelyn Waugh all make their contributions to this delightful volume you will want to read over and over.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this book because of people who I wanted to see interviewed (like Alfred Hitchcock), but this is actually a very interesting book just to see how interviewers approach their subject, and some of the best interviews were with people I'd never heard of.

There are all sorts of interviews. Some are embarrassingly sycophantic, some are surprisingly hostile (one interviewer, who feels his role as a "gentleman" gives him the right to harass celebrities,is just an ass). A couple of interviews with South African politicians are surprising in that the interviewers talk more as though their negotiating diplomats.

Some interviews are almost all dialogue, some are mainly summary. Some are pretty tedious, but most are at least good and some are absolutely fascinating, like one with a confident and rather kooky Mae West, whose interviewer handles very nicely.

I've never thought about interviewing as an art, but there's a lot more to it than I expected.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very very (more than twice) interesting anthology of interviews with really super iconic individuals. Hitler! Mark Twain! Stalin! Oscar Wilde! I had to stop after that. I am truly sad that I will never ever be in such company in any future anthology - but alas, at least one can pick up this volume and be naturally entertained or at least think 'zowie."