The Best Oral History Books: A Reading List
To mark the publication of Jason Okundaye’s Revolutionary Acts, we have put together a list of the best oral history books published by Faber.
Explore works that use oral history and testimony as the basis for wider social and historical evaluation.
Announcing the arrival of a major new talent, an astonishing work of social history which captures Black gay Britain in inimitable detail.
An original and profound portrait of contemporary Britain told through the testimonies of its inhabitants.
Brittle with Relics is a landmark history of the people of Wales during a period of great national change.
Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2019: a searing portrait of Britain’s hostile environment by the journalist behind the Windrush exposé.
A beautiful new edition of The Crooked Scythe: An Anthology of Oral History, by George Ewart Evans – author of the classic Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay.
The first ever oral-history of Krautrock, the sound that changed modern music.
The Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller, Jon Savage’s magisterial oral history is the last word on Joy Division.
‘This year’s most talked-about music book’ (FT) is the definitive oral history of New York’s post-2001 musical revolution by a celebrated music journalist.
From the archives of the American Film Institute comes a unique picture of what it was like to work in Hollywood from its beginnings to its present day.
An indelible exploration of the Cultural Revolution and how it shapes China today, Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the rarely heard stories of individuals who lived through Mao’s decade of madness.
What are Oral Histories?
Oral history books are built from firsthand testimony of events by people who lived through them. Oral histories often emphasise the everyday experience of people living ordinary lives, though they can feature prominent figures too.
An early influential oral history was Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel, published in the USA in 1970. Terkel interviewed more than a hundred people who lived through a tumultuous period in American history. Presented together, these accounts together provide ‘a vivid Window on the Great Depression’ (New York Times).
A more recent celebrated oral history is Second-hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature (Fitzcarralso), which won praise for its depiction of the end of the Soviet Union through a multiplicity of voices.
About Revolutionary Acts
In this landmark work, Jason Okundaye meets an elder generation of Black gay men and finds a spirited community full of courage, charisma and good humour, hungry to tell its past – of nightlife, resistance, political fights, loss, gossip, sex, romance and vulgarity. Through their conversations he seeks to reconcile the Black and gay narratives of Britain, narratives frequently cleaved as distinct and unrelated.
Tracing these men’s journeys and arrivals to South London through the seventies, eighties and nineties from the present day, Okundaye relays their stories with rare compassion, listening as they share intimate memories and reflect upon their lives. They endured and fought against the peak of the AIDS epidemic, built social groups and threw underground parties; they went to war with institutions (and with each other) and created meaning within a society which was often indifferent to their existence.
Announcing the arrival of a major new talent, an astonishing work of social history which captures Black gay Britain in inimitable detail.