Washingtonian
July, 2007
By William O’Sullivan
We’ve asked Washingtonians for good summer reading before, but this time we upped the challenge: What’s the best summer book you’ve ever read?
ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz-whose Iraq W [...]
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May 9, 2007
NPR’s Talk of the Nation
Post-Imus, Where Do Shock Jocks Draw the Line?
NEAL CONAN, host:
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I’m Neal Conan in Washington.
Radio is an intimate medium. Most of us listen while we’re alone. And in the privacy of o [...]
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There was a time when radio was fun.
Today’s venomous political talk shows and the prevalence of Don Imus-style shock-jock racism – which, until last week, anyway, passed as radio humor – make it easy to forget the appeal of Top 40 radio and, later, FM a [...]
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On a Sunday afternoon in 1955, hundreds of Kansas City residents descended upon Loose Park in search of a turtle.
On its shell was inscribed a number. It was the last of many clues delivered over several weeks in a treasure hunt promotion conducted by WH [...]
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By Mark Beech
March 21 (Bloomberg)—On a wet, gloomy night in 2002, eight actors huddled in an old printing plant in Washington to recreate Orson Welles’s ``The War of the Worlds’’ broadcast, one of radio’s most daring moments.
Their mission: to prov [...]
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Bill’s Book Club:
“Bill’s Favorite Book”
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My first television was radio: When my hard-of-hearing parents upped the volume on their new set, I would creep out of bed and sit, out of sight, on the stair landing and listen to whatever they were watching. It wasn’t so different from the radio soaps [...]
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Marc Fisher’s book about Radio’s evolution in America is so good, I’m only on page 209 and I just had to start writing about it. Actually, I wanted to begin this article 100 pages ago but, I restrained myself. Yet, even though I have more than another [...]
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Review by Charlie Clark
Before we break for news and weather, let me spin one more groovy hit to go out to all those baby boomers lurking in Listenerland. Unplug your iPod and hearken back to those teen years when you lay in bed with your ear glued to th [...]
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Much has been made of how such 1950s rock stars as Elvis Presley transformed America by attracting “crossover” audiences—African-Americans drawn to the same music listened to by white teenagers. But Elvis would have been dead in the water without [...]
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Browsing Books
Editor’s Choice
SOMETHING IN THE AIR: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation, by Marc Fisher. (Random House, $27.95.) A history of the development of radio after World War II.
From the review, Jan. 28:
In the late 1940 [...]
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The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
In Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand used the inspirational story of a downtrodden racehorse as the wheel around which she spun the history of America in the 1930s. In a similar vein, Fisher, a column [...]
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By Ron Wynn
Washington Post columnist and author Marc Fisher takes issue with those who consider radio’s “Golden Age” to be the period prior to the ascension of television. Instead, Fisher considers radio’s prime to be the period immediately afterward, [...]
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By Arthur Kempton
The original mass medium, radio has also been the most resilient, having weathered the onslaughts of superseding technologies for 80 years. In the Darwinian churn of the media marketplace, neither television, nor computer, nor iPod has [...]
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An elegantly written and deeply researched study ….
Fisher entertainingly retells the frenetic history of radio in America. He offers wonderful anecdotes….
Reviewed by Douglas Brinkley
Ear-splitting static was the curse of AM radio in its formative [...]
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If you’re a member of the transistor radio generation, you’ll instantly get “Something in the Air,” Marc Fisher’s new book that’s very appropriately titled “Radio, Rock and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation.”
If you’ve got no idea what a transistor [...]
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In “Something in the Air,” the Washington Post writer examines the personalities and trends that shaped American radio, including the birth of Top 40, the invasion of shock jocks, and the rise of NPR. Fun Fact In exchange for receiving a writing [...]
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You have to hand it to radio; every time some new technology comes along to make the medium seem obsolete, it rises to new heights.
Which is not to say those new heights are more spiritually lofty than the lower heights of yore might have been; but radio [...]
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What Everyone Should Be Talking About…
...Marc Fisher explains all with “Something in the Air,” a history of the dial.
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Film critic Joe Meyers:
Radio has been hard hit in recent years by mergers that have left much of the country without truly local programming and a huge chunk of the under-30 audience has been lost to the iPod.
So, there is a deeply nostalgic appeal to [...]
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BY DAVID KIRBY
Special to Newsday
Before there was radio, there was, well, who remembers? As Marc Fisher reminds readers of a certain age in the marvelous nostalgia-fest that is “Something in the Air,” in the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s and even ‘80s, “nobody talk [...]
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By Roger K. Miller
If commercial radio across the country all sounds the same to you today, there is a reason: It is.
“Virtually everyone in radio,” Marc Fisher says, “believes the medium has become less fun, less creative and just plain less worth list [...]
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Fisher’s history of radio reads like the liner notes to an America transformed by rock and rebellion. He spins the oldies, introducing us to DJs like Wolfman Jack and tying their play-lists to politics, tech, and race relations. It’s a tale that will [...]
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The golden age of radio as told by grizzled deejays, canny programmers and one passionate listener. Over the past decade-plus, the advent of the iPod, podcasts and satellite radio has marginalized AM radio to the point that few bother with amplitude [...]
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There’s not a bit of dead air in this well-written and researched history of radio and its pivotal role in the emergence of American youth culture.
Washington Post columnist Fisher (After the Wall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History) traces [...]
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