As National Public Radio's much loved and respected senior foreign correspondent Anne Garrels has covered conflicts in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. In "Naked in Baghdad" she reveals how as one of only sixteen non-embedded journalists who stayed in the now legendary Palestine Hotel throughout the American invasion she managed to deliver the most immediate, insightful and independent reports with unparalleled vividness and immediacy.
Her evolving relationship with her Iraqi driver/minder Amer, and the wonderful e-mail bulletins sent to friends by her husband, Vint Lawrence, counterpoint the daily events of her life in Baghdad, and result in a deeply moving, and intimate portrait by one of bravest and most enlightening news reporters.

The popularity of radio for purposes of instruction and entertainment is a remarkable phenomenon, the full significance of which we have hardly yet grasped. Spiritual Radio is vindicating the work of the great mystics of Christian history; it is demonstrating that the "Interior Life" is not limited to the seclusion of the cloister, but produces a robust type of Christian manhood and womanhood that makes for leadership and achievement in the marvelous age in which our lot is cast.

" Among America's most unusual and successful weapons during the Cold War were Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. RFE-RL had its origins in a post-war America brimming with confidence and secure in its power. Unlike the Voice of America, which conveyed a distinctly American perspective on global events, RFE-RL served as surrogate home radio services and a vital alternative to the controlled, party-dominated domestic press in Eastern Europe. Over twenty stations featured programming tailored to individual countries. They reached millions of listeners ranging from industrial workers to dissident leaders such as Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel. Broadcasting Freedom draws on rare archival material and offers a penetrating insider history of the radios that helped change the face of Europe. Arch Puddington reveals new information about the connections between RFE-RL and the CIA, which provided covert funding for the stations during the critical start-up years in the early 1950s. He relates in detail the efforts of Soviet and Eastern Bloc officials to thwart the stations; their tactics ranged from jamming attempts, assassinations of radio journalists, the infiltration of spies onto the radios' staffs, and the bombing of the radios' headquarters. Puddington addresses the controversies that engulfed the stations throughout the Cold War, most notably RFE broadcasts during the Hungarian Revolution that were described as inflammatory and irresponsible. He shows how RFE prevented the Communist authorities from establishing a monopoly on the dissemination of information in Poland and describes the crucial roles played by the stations as the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union broke apart. Broadcasting Freedom is also a portrait of the Cold War in America. Puddington offers insights into the strategic thinking of the RFE-RL leadership and those in the highest circles of American government, including CIA directors, secretaries of state, and even presidents.

Blending cultural, religious and media history, Tona Hangen offers a detailed look into the world of religious radio. She uses recordings, sermons, fan mail and other sources to tell the stories of the determined broadcasters and devoted listeners who, together, transformed American radio evangelism from an on-air novelty in the 1920s into a profitable and wide-reaching industry by the 1950s. Hangen traces the careers of three of the most successful Protestant radio evangelists - Paul Rader of Chicago, Aimee Semple McPherson of Los Angeles and Charles Fuller of Pasadena - and examines the strategies they used to bring their messages to listerners across the nation. Initially shut out of network radio and free airtime, both of which were available only to mainstream Protestant and Catholic groups, evangelical broadcasters gained access to the airwaves with paid-time programming. By the mid-20th century millions of Americans regularly tuned in to evangelical programming, making it one of the medium's most distinctive and durable genres. The voluntary contributions of these listeners in turn helped to bankroll religious radio's remarkable growth. Revealing the entwined development of evangelical religion and modern mass media, Hangen demonstrates that the history of one is incomplete without the history of the other; both are important to understanding American culture in the 20th century.

James Grout, Jimmy Mulville, Robert Duncan and Andy Hamilton star in six episodes from the third and fourth series of Old Harry's Game, the comedy series set in Hell. Satan may rule the roost, but he's beset by the poor unfortunates condemned to sit out Eternity with him. Amongst them are the Professor, who is convinced that societies evolve and mature until Satan introduces him to Bill Clinton. There's also Scumspawn, who here finds himself trying to deal with a lager lout, and a new arrival in the form of a Health and Safety Officer - who soon announces that the lighting in Hell is inadequate. As for Satan himself, in this batch of episodes he is concerned about his image on Earth, persuaded to remake Casablanca (with Bogart, Bergman and a mutant alien), and determined to prove that the English are the worst nation on Earth. He also takes offence to W.B. Yeats' verse description of him - and so pays a visit to the underworld's own Poets' Corner. The episodes in this volume are: Series Three, Episode One, 24 March 1999; Series Three, Episode Two, 31 March 1999; Series Three, Episode Three, 7 April 1999; Series Four, Episode Two, 5 April 2001; Series Four, Episode Three, 12 April 2001; Series Four, Episode Four, 19 April 2001. A fiery furnace of brilliant one-liners and biting satire, Old Harry's Game is the insider's guide to Hell. 'One of the great comic creations of recent years' - Sunday Telegraph. '... one of the best-written comedies around, sustained over its 12 years on the air by brilliant performances and production' - Daily Telegraph. 3 CDs. 2 hrs 48 mins.

A pioneering analysis of radio as both a cultural and material production, Communities of the Air explores radio's powerful role in shaping Anglo-American culture and society since the early twentieth century. Scholars and radio writers, producers, and critics look at the many ways radio generates multiple communities over the air-from elite to popular, dominant to resistant, canonical to transgressive. The contributors approach radio not only in its own right, but also as a set of practices-both technological and social-illuminating broader issues such as race relations, gender politics, and the construction of regional and national identities. Drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, science studies and feminist theory, radio history, and the new field of radio studies, these essays consider the development of radio as technology: how it was modeled on the telephone, early conflicts between for-profit and public uses of radio, and amateur radio (HAMS), local programming, and low-power radio. Some pieces discuss how radio gives voice to different cultural groups, focusing on the BBC and poetry programming in the West Indies, black radio, the history of alternative radio since the 1970s, and science and contemporary arts programming. Others look at radio's influence on gender (and gender's influence on radio) through examinations of Queen Elizabeth's broadcasts, Gracie Allen's comedy, and programming geared toward women. Together the contributors demonstrate how attention to the variety of ways radio is used and understood reveals the dynamic emergence and transformation of communities within the larger society. Contributors. Laurence A. Breiner, Bruce B. Campbell, Mary Desjardins, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Nina Hunteman, Leah Lowe, Adrienne Munich, Kathleen Newman, Martin Spinelli, Susan Merrill Squier, Donald Ulin, Mark Williams, Steve Wurzler

"How to DJ" is the insider's guide to becoming a professional DJ. Written by two industry insiders who DJ and produce hit records throughout the world, this is the concise, how-to sourcebook that comes straight from real DJs and musicians. They explain and demonstrate everything you need to know---from the basics of what DJs do and how they got their careers off of the ground to the worldwide phenomenon of DJ/producers who work with the biggest names in the business and make the music in the charts today.
-- top advice on how to DJ---from selecting what to spin to getting gigs to keeping your audience dancing
-- technology made easy---what you need and how to set it up
-- how the DJ and music business works and how to rise to the top
-- how to make hit records at home
-- interviews and tips from celebrity DJs including Tall Paul, Boy George, Tim Westwood, Andy Cato, Mr. C, Andy Wilson, BT, Jeremy Healy, Allister Whitehead, and Sasha.

"It was all so honest, before the end of our collective innocence. Top Forty jocks screamed and yelled and sounded mightier than God on millions of transistor radios. But on FM radio it was all spun out for only you. On a golden web by a master weaver driven by fifty thousand magical watts of crystal clear power . . . before the days of trashy, hedonistic dumbspeak and disposable three-minute ditties . . . in the days where rock lived at many addresses in many cities."
–from FM

As a young man, Richard Neer dreamed of landing a job at WNEW in New York–one of the revolutionary FM stations across the country that were changing the face of radio by rejecting strict formatting and letting disc jockeys play whatever they wanted. He felt that when he got there, he’d have made the big time. Little did he know he’d have shaped rock history as well.

FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio chronicles the birth, growth, and death of free-form rock-and-roll radio through the stories of the movement’s flagship stations. In the late sixties and early seventies–at stations like KSAN in San Francisco, WBCN in Boston, WMMR in Philadelphia, KMET in Los Angeles, WNEW, and others–disc jockeys became the gatekeepers, critics, and gurus of new music. Jocks like Scott Muni, Vin Scelsa, Jonathan Schwartz, and Neer developed loyal followings and had incredible influence on their listeners and on the early careers of artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Genesis, the Cars, and many others.

Full of fascinating firsthand stories, FM documents the commodification of an iconoclastic phenomenon, revealing how counterculture was coopted and consumed by the mainstream. Richard Neer was an eyewitness to, and participant in, this history. FM is the tale of his exhilarating ride.


From the Hardcover edition.

This book, which originally appeared as a special issue of TDR/The Drama Review, explores the myriad aesthetic, cultural, and experimental possibilities of radiophony and sound art. Art making and criticism have focused mainly on the visual media. This book, which originally appeared as a special issue of TDR/The Drama Review, explores the myriad aesthetic, cultural, and experimental possibilities of radiophony and sound art. Taking the approach that there is no single entity that constitutes "radio," but rather a multitude of radios, the essays explore various aspects of its apparatus, practice, forms, and utopias. The approaches include historical, political, popular cultural, archeological, semiotic, and feminist. Topics include the formal properties of radiophony, the disembodiment of the radiophonic voice, aesthetic implications of psychopathology, gender differences in broadcast musical voices and in narrative radio, erotic fantasy, and radio as an electronic memento mori. The book includes a new piece by Allen Weiss on the origins of sound recording. Contributors John Corbett, Tony Dove, Rene Farabet, Richard Foreman, Rev. Dwight Frizzell, Mary Louise Hill, G. X. Jupitter-Larsen, Douglas Kahn, Terri Kapsalis, Alexandra L. M. Keller, Lou Mallozzi, Jay Mandeville, Christof Migone, Joe Milutis, Kaye Mortley, Mark S. Roberts, Susan Stone, Allen S. Weiss, Gregory Whitehead, David Williams, Ellen Zweig

The classic serial, invented by BBC Radio Drama sixty years ago, survived and adapted itself to television, the arrival of colour and the global market in what has become a flood of classics with all channels competing for ratings and overseas sales. This richly detailed book traces these developments and analyses the genre's response to social, economic, technical and cultural changes, which have re-shaped it into the form we recognise today. The book contains considerable interview material with performers and media professionals.

Was the first radio news network for blacks a boon--or a bust? Author Sanders was there from the beginning and stayed on the air for over 20 years. Here he recounts the trials and tribulations of launching--and sustaining--the pride of a pioneering network.

There are approximately 502 million radios in America. For this savvy, far-reaching diary, celebrated journalist and author Vowell turned hers on and listened--closely, critically, creatively--for an entire year.
As a series of impressions and reflections regarding contemporary American culture, and as an extended meditation on both our media and our society, this keenly focused book is as insightful as it is refreshing.
Throughout "Radio On," "Vowell's touch is about as delicate as Teddy Kennedy's after a pitcher of martinis" (Richard Roeper, "Chicago Sun-Times").

With this invaluable resource, Stern's 16 million weekly listeners can keep a wealth of information stored at their fingertips--from Howard's middle name (Alan) and favorite food (Chinese) to his least successful school subject (chemistry). It's everything a fan needs to know!

The alienation of the self, the annihilation of the body, the fracturing, dispersal, and reconstruction of the disembodied voice: the themes of modernism, even of modern consciousness, occur as a matter of course in the phantasmic realm of radio. In this original work of cultural criticism, Allen S. Weiss explores the meaning of radio to the modern imagination. Weaving together cultural and technological history, aesthetic analysis, and epistemological reflection, his investigation reveals how radiophony transforms expression and, in doing so, calls into question assumptions about language and being, body and voice. Phantasmic Radio presents a new perspective on the avant-garde radio experiments of Antonin Artaud and John Cage, and brings to light fascinating, lesser-known work by, among others, Valere Novarina, Gregory Whitehead, and Christof Migone. Weiss shows how Artaud's "body without organs" establishes the closure of the flesh after the death of God; how Cage's "imaginary landscapes" proffer the indissociability of techne and psyche; how Novarina reinvents the body through the word in his "theater of the ears." Going beyond the art historical context of these experiments, Weiss describes how, with their emphasis on montage and networks of transmission, they marked out the coordinates of modernism and prefigured what we now recognize as the postmodern.

The biography of the radio comic Fred Allen is a vision of comedy in the 20th century and of an individual remembered for his incisive wit and talent. Starting in vaudeville as the "World's Worst Juggler," graduating to the Broadway stage of variety shows and torch singers, Fred Allen became an American icon in the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing from Allen's scripts, journals, letters and books, Robert Taylor has recreated that humour. Robert Taylor is the author of "Saranac" and is art critic and senior book critic for the "Boston Globe".

Acoustic signals, voice, sound, articulation, music and spatial networking are dispositifs of radiophonic transmission which have brought forth a great number of artistic practices. Up to and into the digital present radio has been and is employed and explored as an apparatus-based structure as well as an expanded model for performance and perception. This volume investigates a broad range of aesthetic experiments with the broadcasting technology of radio, and the use of radio as a means of disseminating artistic concepts. With exemplary case studies, its contributions link conceptual, recipient-response-related, and sociocultural issues to matters of relevance to radio art's mediation.

Ready for the first biography on blonde, bubbly Marie Wilson? Was she really that vapid? Well - read the book on the My Friend Irma star!

WBAA: 100 Years as the Voice of Purdue documents the fascinating history of WBAA, Indiana's first radio station founded at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, on April 4, 1922. Richly illustrated with more than 150 photos, the book chronicles the station's evolution over the years, while highlighting the staff, students, and volunteers significant to WBAA's success. WBAA began as a lab experiment conducted by Purdue electrical engineering students in 1910. Later, the station became a vital method for Purdue's Cooperative Extension Service to broadcast the knowledge of the university, particularly agricultural news, to the people of the state. From the 1960s to 1980s, WBAA aired Purdue basketball and football games, with station manager John DeCamp as the "Voice of the Boilermakers." In 1971, WBAA became a member station of National Public Radio (NPR), offering popular programming such as All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Listeners tuned into WBAA to hear classical, jazz, and international music, along with in-depth news reporting. Mayors and Purdue presidents aired weekly programs. WBAA gave a voice to arts and community organizations. Read about the invention of the first all-electronic television by pioneering Purdue scientist Roscoe George; WBAA's long-running School of the Air educational program deemed the "invisible textbook"; and the Midwest Program on Airborne Television Instruction (MPATI), an airplane that transmitted videos to schools while flying over six Midwestern states in the 1960s. Famous WBAA alumni include NBC sportscaster Chris Schenkel, comedian Durward Kirby, Today Show newscaster Lew Wood, Indiana State Representative Sheila Klinker, actress Karen Black, and actor George Peppard, among others. From the vacuum tube era to the digital age, this thoroughly researched book brings to light the intriguing backstories of the esteemed one hundred-year history of WBAA.