Listening
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, Listening takes readers on a journey to discover not ways of life but ways to life. Within these pages,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.
Jonathan Cott is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker. He is author of twenty books, including Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children’s Literature; Days That I’ll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono; Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview; and Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein. He lives in New York City.