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.

First introduced in a 1938 comic book, Superman has since become an iconic character in American entertainment. This complete history covers Superman's appearances in film and television, from the 1941 introduction of the first Superman cartoon to the 2006 live-action film Superman Returns. The book includes several rarely seen photographs of the actors who have brought Superman to life for over seven decades, including Clayton "Bud" Collyer, Kirk Alyn, George Reeves and Christopher Reeve. Multiple appendices provide a complete listing of Superman-related books and websites, along with a comprehensive list of the cast and characters featured in Superman films, television shows, and radio programs since 1941.

Tig Torres investigates Hollow Falls' horrific history in this original novel based on the hit podcast Lethal Lit from Einhorn's Epic Productions and iHeartRadio! Lethal Lit follows Tig Torres, a Cuban American teen detective, in her hometown of Hollow Falls. In season one of the hit podcast, Tig used her smarts and fearlessness to track down the infamous Lit Killer, a serial killer who staged his murders after death scenes from famous books. But there's no rest for courageous, mystery-solving teens in a place like Hollow Falls, and though the Lit Killer is now behind bars, his protege, Tig's classmate and crush Oly, has disappeared! And that's not the only game afoot. Tig has caught the attention of the town's local armchair detective group, the Murder of Crows. They're obsessed with Hollow Falls' dark past and fixated on a dangerous search for the missing body of the town's founder. There are rumours about what's buried with the body that could be life-changing for whoever finds it, and with a mission like that underway, it's not long before a member of the Murder of Crows turns up dead. Tig, along with her friends Max and Wyn, steps in to help, but the stakes are getting higher and the hunt more deadly. Someone's willing to kill to keep the town's secrets buried, and if Tig's not careful, she'll be the Murder of Crows' next victim. This original Lethal Lit story takes place between Seasons 1 and 2 of the podcast Features a brand-new, never-before-told story starring Tig Torres and her sleuthing friends! Perfect for fans of true crime.

Full-cast dramatisations of seven of Ruth Rendell's tense psychological thrillers. This collection includes: The Bridesmaid: A beautiful stone statue and her living double lead Philip into a nightmare of obsession and murder. Going Wrong: Besotted with his childhood sweetheart, Leonora, psychopathic Guy Curran will do anything to make her his. King Solomon's Carpet: London's Underground links a group of misfit housemates and is the catalyst for a devastating crime in this compelling tale, written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. People Don't Do Such Things: A suburban couple befriend a charismatic novelist, but their relationship soon slips into sinister territory. The Fever Tree: On safari in South Africa, Ford and Tricia find the tensions in their marriage exacerbated by the unforgiving wilderness. The Dreadful Day of Judgment: Clearing up an abandoned cemetery, John, Gilly and Marlon's personal demons come to the fore. Thornapple: Poison enthusiast James becomes captivated by the ruthless Meribel on a visit to her wealthy aunt. Among the casts of these seven suspenseful adaptations are Jamie Glover, Mark Strong, Reece Shearsmith, Paul Rhys, Danny Sapani and Juliet Aubrey. Duration: 7 hours approx.

Eddie Mair is, by his own account, one of Britain's most beloved broadcasters. Born in Dundee, Scotland, he has worked in radio all his adult life. From the foothills of commercial radio in his hometown, through the sunlit uplands of the BBC in Scotland, he has reached the peaks of his profession, with BBC network radio in London. And he's never afraid to work a metaphor beyond endurance. In addition he's appeared on most of the BBC's TV channels, including ones that are no longer on TV. He witnessed the handover of Hong Kong and once asked Arnold Schwarzenegger a question - though he takes no responsibility for either. For nearly twenty years he has been at the helm of Radio 4's PM: a nightly news round up that means Eddie works for just one hour a day, giving him plenty time to knock together these diaries. Whether he's interviewing politicians, getting people to share their personal experiences, or just imparting his favourite zesty chicken recipes, Eddie is never happier than when he is at the microphone. Except when he is at the microphone with a large martini. In truth, his neediness is an irritation to everyone who knows him and if you buy this book he might get out of their hair. Eddie's other work, as a humanitarian and tireless, secret worker for charity is not mentioned in these pages.

This new revised and expanded edition of Reality Radio celebrates today's best audio documentary work by bringing together some of the most influential and innovative practitioners from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. With a new foreword and five new essays, this book takes stock of the transformations in radio documentary since the publication of the first edition: the ascendance of the podcast; greater cultural, racial, and topical variety; and the changing economics of radio itself. In twenty-four essays total, documentary artists tell--and demonstrate, through stories and transcripts--how they make radio the way they do, and why. Whether the contributors to the volume call themselves journalists, storytellers, or even audio artists--and although their essays are just as diverse in content and approach--all use sound to tell true stories, artfully. Contributors include Jad Abumrad, Daniel Alarcon, Jay Allison, damali ayo, John Biewen, Emily Botein, Chris Brookes, Scott Carrier, Katie Davis, Sherre DeLys, Ira Glass, Alan Hall, Dave Isay, Natalie Kestecher, Starlee Kine, The Kitchen Sisters, Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder, Maria Martin, Karen Michel, Joe Richman, Dmae Roberts, Stephen Smith, Alix Spiegel, Sandy Tolan, and Glynn Washington.

Before the internet, before TV, Manitoba was a hotbed for innovation in radio. These innovations range from the first publically-owned radio station to the first play-by-play broadcast of women's hockey. During World War II, a Winnipeg broadcaster was as well-known in England as Churchill. And Neil Young's very first recording was done at a local station. These are but a few of the stories of early radio in Manitoba. In its first half century, the medium was a powerful, revolutionary force that touched and linked virtually everyone in the province.

In an innovative cultural history of Argentine movies and radio in the decades before Peronism, Matthew B. Karush demonstrates that competition with jazz and Hollywood cinema shaped Argentina's domestic cultural production in crucial ways, as Argentine producers tried to elevate their offerings to appeal to consumers seduced by North American modernity. At the same time, the transnational marketplace encouraged these producers to compete by marketing "authentic" Argentine culture. Domestic filmmakers, radio and recording entrepreneurs, lyricists, musicians, actors, and screenwriters borrowed heavily from a rich tradition of popular melodrama. Although the resulting mass culture trafficked in conformism and consumerist titillation, it also disseminated versions of national identity that celebrated the virtue and dignity of the poor, while denigrating the wealthy as greedy and mean-spirited. This anti-elitism has been overlooked by historians, who have depicted radio and cinema as instruments of social cohesion and middle-class formation. Analyzing tango and folk songs, film comedies and dramas, radio soap operas, and other genres, Karush argues that the Argentine culture industries generated polarizing images and narratives that provided much of the discursive raw material from which Juan and Eva Peron built their mass movement.

Forty million Americans indulged in a national obsession in 1930: they eagerly tuned in Amos 'n' Andy, the nightly radio comedy in which a pair of white actors portrayed the adventures of two black men making a new life in the big city. Meanwhile, some angry African Americans demanded that Amos 'n' Andy be banned, even as others gathered in the barbershops and radio stores of Harlem to chuckle over the adventures of Amos, Andy, and the Kingfish.

Melvin Patrick Ely unveils a fascinating tale of America's shifting color line, in which two professional directors of blackface minstrel shows manage to produce a series so rich and complex that it wins admirers ranging from ultra-racists to outspoken racial egalitarians. Eventually, the pair stir further controversy when they bring their show to television.

In a preface written especially for this new edition of his acclaimed classic, Ely shows how white and black responses to his Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy since 1991 tell a revealing story of their own about racial hopes and fears at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Western democracy is currently under attack by a resurgent Russia, weaponizing new technologies and social media. How to respond? During the Cold War, the West fought off similar Soviet propaganda assaults with shortwave radio broadcasts. Founded in 1949, the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcast uncensored information to the Soviet republics in their own languages. About one-third of Soviet urban adults listened to Western radio. The broadcasts played a key role in ending the Cold War and eroding the communist empire. R. Eugene Parta was for many years the director of Soviet Area Audience Research at RFE/RL, charged among others with gathering listener feedback. In this book he relates a remarkable Cold War operation to assess the impact of Western radio broadcasts on Soviet listeners by using a novel survey research approach. Given the impossibility of interviewing Soviet citizens in their own country, it pioneered audacious interview methods in order to fly under the radar and talk to Soviets traveling abroad, ultimately creating a database of 51,000 interviews which offered unparalleled insights into the media habits and mindset of the Soviet public. By recounting how the "impossible" mission was carried out, Under the Radar also shows how the lessons of the past can help counter the threat from a once and current adversary.

Here is a first-hand portrait of the flamboyant American genius who became a titanic figure in twentieth century popular culture. Orson Welles revolutionised theatre, terrified a nation of radio listeners, and made cinematic history with Citizen Kane, regarded by many as the greatest American film ever made.

Fleeing the Nazis, Theodor W. Adorno lived in New York City as a refugee from 1938 until 1941. During these years, he was intensively involved in a study of how the recently developed techniques for the nation-wide transmission of music over radio were transforming the perception of music itself. This broad ranging radio research was conceived as nothing less than an investigation, partly empirical, of Walter Benjamins speculative claims for the emancipatory potential of art in the age of its mechanical reproduction. The results of Adornos project set him decisively at odds with Benjamins theses and at the same time became the body of thinking that formed the basis for Adornos own aesthetics in his Philosophy of New Music.
Current of Music is the title that Adorno himself gave to this research project. For complex reasons, however, Adorno was not able to bring the several thousands of pages of this massive study, most of it written in English, to a final form prior to leaving New York for California, where he would immediately begin work with Max Horkheimer on the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Robert Hullot-Kentor, the distinguished Adorno scholar, reconstructed Adornos project for the Adorno Archive in Germany and provides a lengthy and informative introduction to the fragmentary texts collected in this volume.
Current of Music will be widely discussed for the light it throws on the development of Adornos own thought, on his complex relationship with Walter Benjamin, but most of all for the important perspectives it provides on questions of popular culture, the music of industrial entertainment, the history of radio and the social dimensions of the reproduction of art.

Using film theory and current criticism, White traces the figure of woman in the work of Max Ophuls.

"A very solid and comprehensive collection of essays that allows readers to witness more concretely the variety of forms that the dialogue between literature and the radio has taken in the last century. An outstanding book."--Jean-Michel Rabate, author of "Jacques Lacan and Literature" "This book is a real gift: its variety of essays in different voices provides an opportunity to get up to speed with the sometimes suprising ways that radio helped to structure modernism, served as a foil for modernist writers and artists, and forced the modernists into a more constructive engagement with issues of elite and popular culture. A lively collection."--Kevin J.H. Dettmar, author of "Is Rock Dead?" It has long been accepted that film helped shape the modernist novel and that modernist poetry would be inconceivable without the typewriter. Yet radio, a key influence on modernist literature, remains the invisible medium. The contributors to "Broadcasting Modernism" argue that radio led to changes in textual and generic forms. Modernist authors embraced the emerging medium, creating texts that were to be heard but not read, incorporating the device into their stories, and using it to publicize their work. They saw in radio the same spirit of experimentation that animated modernism itself. Because early broadcasts were rarely recorded, radio's influence on literary modernism often seems equally ephemeral in the historical record. "Broadcasting Modernism" helps fill this void, providing a new perspective for modernist studies even as it reconfigures the landscape of the era itself. Debra Rae Cohen is assistant professor of English at the University of South Carolina Michael Coyle is professor of English at Colgate University. Jane Lewty has published on radio and the work of Joyce, Woolf, and Pound.

This collection examines the work of Norman Corwin - one of the most important, yet understudied, media authors of all time - as a critical lens to view the history of multimedia authorship and sound production. Known as the "poet laureate" of radio, Corwin is most famous for his radio dramas, which reached millions of listeners around the world and contributed to radio's success as a mass media form in the 1930s and 1940s. But Corwin was also a pioneer in other fields, including cinema, theater, TV, and journalism. In each of these areas, he had a distinctive approach to "soundwork," relying on inventive prerecorded and live-in-real-time atmospheric effects in the studio, among other aesthetic techniques. Exploring the range of Corwin's work-from his World War II-era poetry and his special projects for the United Nations to his path-breaking writing for film and television - and its influence on media today, these essays underscore the political and social impact of Corwin's oeuvre and cement his reputation as a key writer in the history of many sound media.

The National Barn Dance was the nation's most popular country music radio show during the 1930s and 1940s. The pioneering radio program defined country and western entertainment until the Grand Ole Opry and rock 'n' roll supplanted it in the 1950s. Broadcast for more than three decades from Chicago on WLS's powerful 50,000-watt signal, the show reached listeners throughout the Midwest, the East Coast, and South, delivering popular entertainment to both rural and urban areas while celebrating the fading folk traditions of an increasingly urbanized America. The Hayloft Gang draws on the colorful commentary of performers and former listeners to analyze the National Barn Dance, its audience, and its impact. Contributors trace the history of barn dance radio, explore the paradox of a foundational country music program broadcast from a major city, investigate notions of authenticity in the presentation of country music and entertainment, and delve into provocative issues raised by the barn dance phenomenon. Contributors: Chad Berry, Michael T. Bertrand, Lisa Krissoff Boehm, Don Cusic, Wayne W. Daniel, Loyal Jones, Kristine M. McCusker, Stephen Parry, Susan Smulyan, Paul L. Tyler, and Michael Ann Williams.

For four decades, Ideas has presented more than 400,000 CBC Radio listeners in Canada and the United States with the most challenging contemporary thought of the day. Now, to mark the program's 40th anniversary, executive producer Bernie Lucht has selected the most striking interviews and lectures for Ideas: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds. Featuring some the best thinkers from North America and around the world that have appeared on the program since its beginnings in 1965, Ideas: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds touches upon societal values, how we govern ourselves, and navigating in the international community. In this remarkable book, Bernie Lucht, winner of the John Drainie Award for broadcast journalism, introduces readers to the origins of the ground-breaking program and to "the best ideas you'll hear tonight." Since the beginning, geopolitics has been one of the significant concerns of the program, and issues such as democracy, dictatorships, the nature of the nation-state, the public good, ideology, religion, peace and violence keep returning to the fore. Although many of the topics have been around for decades, the questions remain startlingly topical today, even in a radically changed world. Exploring geopolitics writ large, Ideas features interviews, lectures and radio documentaries with such influential contemporary thinkers as Tariq Ali, Michael Bliss, Noam Chomsky, Ursula Franklin, Northrop Frye, Bernard Lewis, Margaret MacMillan, James Orbinski, and many, many others. While each thinker speaks from his or her specific experience in time, the themes and concerns resonate as much today as they did last week or forty years ago.

This study examines the culture of Yiddish radio in the United States during radio's golden age. Ari Y. Kelman explores the dynamic relationships between an immigrant population and a mass medium and between audience and community. By focusing on voices previously excluded from radio histories, this treatment of non-English-language radio breaks new ground in the study of both American mass media and immigrant culture. Yiddish radio directly addressed the everyday lives of Jewish immigrants, while providing them with invaluable guidance as they struggled to become American. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, radio created a virtual place where Jewish immigrants could listen to voices like theirs and affirm the sound of their community as it evolved, particularly in light of World War II and the years that followed.

This unique anthology assembles primary documents chronicling the development of the phonograph, film sound, and the radio. These three sound technologies shaped Americans' relation to music from the late nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War, by which time the technologies were thoroughly integrated into everyday life. There are more than 120 selections between the collection's first piece, an article on the phonograph written by Thomas Edison in 1878, and its last, a column advising listeners "desirous of gaining more from music as presented by the radio." Among the selections are articles from popular and trade publications, advertisements, fan letters, corporate records, fiction, and sheet music. Taken together, the selections capture how the new sound technologies were shaped by developments such as urbanization, the increasing value placed on leisure time, and the rise of the advertising industry. Most importantly, they depict the ways that the new sound technologies were received by real people in particular places and moments in time.

Rebecca Front presents this two-part look back at Victoria Wood's stand-up and songs using her own archives and tapes - including never-before-heard material Victoria Wood was a comedian, actress and all-round national treasure. She wrote and starred in countless sketches, plays, musicals, films and sitcoms over four decades, winning numerous awards, and her work remains timeless to this day. With her perceptive observational humour, she made the everyday and mundane hilarious - but how did she do it? In this BBC Radio 4 documentary, Rebecca Front uses Victoria Wood's personal rehearsal recordings, rare live performances and behind-the-scenes footage to reveal some of her comedy tricks and techniques. We hear about her instinctive sense of rhythm, amazing rhyming ability and unerring knack for finding the perfect word to make a sentence sing, and learn how she honed her unique talent to become one of Britain's favourite funny women. With unprecedented access to Victoria's own boxes of battered cassette tapes, this programme is a shameless chance to hear some wonderful stand-up comedy, characters and songs, mixed with a look back at what made her so funny and so universally loved. Executive Producer: Geoff Posner Produced by David Tyler A Pozzitive production for BBC Radio 4.