Listening: Interviews, 1970-1989

A wide-ranging collection of interviews and profiles from twenty years of Jonathan Cott's remarkable writings

"All I really need to do is simply ask a question," Jonathan Cott occasionally reminds himself. "And then listen." It sounds simple, but in fact few have taken the art of asking questions to such heights--and depths--as Jonathan Cott, whom Jan Morris called "an incomparable interviewer," one whose skill, according to the great interviewer and oral historian Studs Terkel, "is artless yet impassioned and knowing."

Collected here are twenty-two of Cott's most illuminating interviews that encourage readers to listen to film directors and musicians, actors and writers, scientists and visionaries. These conversations affirm the indispensable and transformative powers of the imagination and offer us new ways to view these lives and their worlds. What is it like to be Bob Dylan making a movie? Carl Sagan taking on the cosmos? Oliver Sacks doctoring the soul? John Lennon, on December 5, 1980? Elizabeth Taylor, ever? From Chinua Achebe to Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), Federico Fellini to Werner Herzog, and Oriana Fallaci to Studs Terkel, Cott proves himself to be, in the words of Brain Pickings's Maria Popova, "an interlocutor extraordinaire," drawing candid insights and profound observations from these inspired and inspiring individuals.

As Larry McMurtry has remarked, "Jonathan Cott has even managed to construct something that looks rather like a new form, the essay-interview, and he sees himself as part of a tradition that includes Boswell, Eckerman, Oscar Lewis, and Studs Terkel. He can hold his own in that company, too."