NONFICTION - May 21, 1995

LISTENING TO AMERICA: Twenty-Five Years in the Life of the Nation as Heard on National Public Radio edited by Linda Wertheimer (Houghton Mifflin: $24.95; 423 pp.). “My proposals on revenue sharing, government reorganization, health care, and the environment have now been before the Congress for nearly a year.” Bill Clinton, 1994 perhaps? No: Richard Nixon, 1972. You can’t finish “Listening to America,” which consists of selected transcripts from National Public Radio broadcasts, without a sense of deja vu --that the world’s problems will always be with us, that progress is many times an illusion. Not that the book isn’t a pleasure to read--it is, being literate and incisive, often funny, and only occasionally dated.

NPR has long been accused of liberal bias, as an oversensitive executive notes in his foreword, and that inclination is indeed apparent in this volume--but less in the network’s take on the news than its choice of stories and sources. “Listening to America” makes clear that unlike most of their commercial counterparts, NPR correspondents frequently bypass the pick of the news litter to interview the runt, the ugly duckling whose voice usually goes unheard. NPR’s affinity for unexpected views leads to striking radio moments, even in print: the South African yuppie saying in 1985, “I think the average black person in this country is quite happy with his deal and his lot. . . . I wouldn’t mind them living next door as long as they could be, you know, on the same standard of living as I am, as an equal”; the New York City gang member, minutes after eluding an admitted assault rap, saying in 1990 that although he’d been shot at and assaulted himself, “the scariest thing for a teenager is being seventeen years old and being scared that your parents have no money for the rent”; the quiet 10-year-old orphan, a refugee of Mozambique’s ages-old civil war, finally reunited with surviving relatives, the bittersweet story closing with the acknowledgment that 200,000 more Mozambican children have yet to go home. At times reading this book is like perusing old newspapers--some of the excerpts are straight daily reportage, such as Nina Totenberg’s breaking coverage of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas scandal--but the book is usually more interesting than that, especially when we can follow the evolution of significant ongoing issues--the spread of AIDS, for example--over time. The book’s editor (and “All Things Considered” regular) Linda Wertheimer has done a good job mixing the profane with the sacred--yes, you’ll find an illuminating Wintogreen Life Saver segment (1982), and likewise a luminous piece on spontaneous human combustion (1984, appropriately). It’s serendipitous--or maybe just savvy--that a number of books chronicling NPR’s best work have reached the market just as its existence is seriously threatened by political opponents.