Book review: Oral history off the record: toward an ethnography of practice by Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki

"Oral History off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice." Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki (eds.). Palgrave Macmillan. October 2013. --- Most discussions of oral history method are rooted in abstract ideas about what interviewing should be and should achieve. However, interviews are ultimately personal interactions between human beings, and rarely conform to a methodological ideal. The struggles interviewers face while conducting interviews mostly go unacknowledged, and this collection aims to show that a full account of oral history methodology must include honest and rigorous analyses of actual practice, allowing us to embrace the uncertainties that define a human-centered methodology. Nafiseh Sharifi is impressed with this collection and recommends it to students and practitioners of oral history.