'Listening' a page-turner packed with historic revelations

— -- In radio circles, it's a home run when you deliver a "driveway moment." That's when listeners in their cars reach their destination but are so captivated they can't bear to turn off the radio.

Listening Is an Act of Love is the book equivalent of a driveway moment: You won't want to stop turning pages.

The book springs from the recorded word: It is based on the largest oral history project in U.S. history. The interviews collected range from the everyday to the monumental. And it's a winning intersection of the business (the non-profit StoryCorps runs the project) and cultural worlds.

Each interview is a revelation. One session, for example, begins simply and builds to a stunning conclusion.

Taylor Rogers, 79, recalls the indignities of his job as a sanitation worker — lugging tubs of garbage from backyards with waste and maggots leaking down his shoulders, low pay, no benefits. After two co-workers were crushed on the job and their families weren't compensated, the workers attempted to unionize and went on strike, marching for 65 days.

At that point, it begins to dawn on the reader that this is no ordinary story. We learn that Martin Luther King Jr. arrived to help the sanitation workers. This was in 1968 in Memphis.

"He stopped everything, set everything aside, to come to Memphis to see about the people on the bottom of the ladder: the sanitation workers. The day before that march, that's the day he was assassinated," Rogers said.

It's as if we're eavesdropping on history as it happens, from a perspective often overlooked.

That same sensation inspired the founder of StoryCorps, radio documentary producer Dave Isay. Awed by the historical power of recordings made by Works Progress Administration folklorists and writers who toured the country in the 1930s and '40s, Isay started the non-profit StoryCorps in 2003 to gather the stories of everyday Americans.

The idea, he says, caught on, and StoryCorps became one of the fastest-growing U.S. non-profits.