Tales from before the grave

Desiderata, a prayer penned in the 1920s but with aspirations to archaism, urges us to listen to "even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story". Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer prize-winning tape-recorder operator who in his ninetieth year is still lugging his recording equipment down the streets of Chicago in the hunt for material, built a justifiably acclaimed career following this advice. Published 30 years ago, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, remains, for example, one of the best accounts of how the toad, as Larkin called work, squats on lives.

Terkel's technique is to leave his tape running long enough for his subjects to explain themselves to themselves ("I never knew I felt that way," a young mother once told him, hearing herself played back). Death, which is the theme of this collection of interviews, however, proves a subject beyond his method's scope. Lacking first-hand experience of death, we are all, in this instance, truly ignorant, and Terkel does not succeed in making many of his victims sound much better than dullards on the subject.

This is not to say that age is robbing him of his gifts as an interviewer. Only once does he miss an obvious follow-up question, when Kurt Vonnegut says he has attempted suicide and Terkel neglects to ask when and why. Otherwise, his ability to extract blood from stones remains unequalled. But 30 years ago Gore Vidal steered him towards this bum subject and, after his wife's death, he got off on the wrong foot by taking his title from a sentimental hymn, which demands that the circle of life shall not be broken by death.

Terkel turns the article of faith into a question and his 63 subjects are at their least illuminating answering it. Few believe slavishly in the teachings of churches, but their home-made versions of spirituality are hardly more compelling. A neuroradiologist calls death a "portal, an opening to another type of life, a life that we can't explain or understand". A former marine says the spirit is going to go "wherever it is going to go". A woman who spent two years in a coma awakes from it believing she has lived before as an "Inuit Eskimo Indian". The lawyer wife of film critic Roger Ebert claims to have met the Grim Reaper in her bedroom. He is 7ft, dressed in a monk's robe and has a dark face with "lit orbs" where his eyes should be. Terkel, a non-believer, concludes that faith is a vaccination against grief. If only it worked for fear.

Still, heading for those who treat with death professionally - firemen, cops, old soldiers, doctors and undertakers - he occasionally extracts new information. A paramedic remarks on the "death howl" of the bereaved mother told her child is dead. "The howling," his friend, a nurse, agrees, "the screaming, the falling on the floor, the almost seizure-like activity." Other strong sections, in a loosely organised and frequently rambling book, cover the Aids epidemic, cancer and a remarkable account of the Hiroshima bombing.

Terkel has interviewed many of these "heroes", as he calls his subjects, before. But while it is a pleasure to hear, for example, that Kid Pharaoh, a shady but well-educated debt-collector, is still alive and resident at the Webster Hotel, our main interest is in learning how he survived the 30 years since we last met rather than hearing him quote Hamlet on that undiscovered country. A neurosurgeon in Washington DC seems to make it into print for no better reason than that Terkel interviewed his grandmother in 1965, a fortnight before he was born.

As a boy, Terkel writes in a beautifully written introductory essay, he tried to trick himself to sleep by reciting the names of celebrities. Now he counts down the names of dead friends. If dying really involves your past running back before your eyes, it is obviously high time he saw his doctor and hung up his microphone. It is time he honed an account of a wise and interesting life, namely his own.