NONFICTION - May 23, 1993

TALK: NPR’s Susan Stamberg Considers All Things by Susan Stamberg (Turtle Bay Books: $24; 374 pp.) Radio is something we typically listen to while doing something else--driving, sunning, cooking dinner. And that means we don’t tend to take it very seriously, that we underestimate the kind of work and intelligence that goes into a superior radio broadcast. For that reason alone it’s good to have “Talk,” a collection of annotated interviews covering Susan Stamberg’s 20 years as a journalist on National Public Radio, mainly as co-host of the program “All Things Considered.” Stamberg can get unnecessarily prickly, but often her strong opinions push subjects into unexpected territory. After Stamberg asks Lord Snowdon (Anthony Armstrong Jones) to take her picture, for example, Snowdon declines, saying “the camera is unimportant”; and although director Marcel Ophuls is happy to get into a discussion about his long, serious documentaries (“I think there’s a relationship between attention span and morality”), he’ll also say his profession is “show business” and his hero Fred Astaire. At almost 400 pages and encompassing some 85 separate interviews, “Talk” is a bit like a giant bowl of potato chips: although a few pieces are overdone, and others ordinary, some are so good you end up addicted in spite of yourself.