LISTENING TO AMERICA: 25 Years in the...

LISTENING TO AMERICA: 25 Years in the Life of a Nation, as Heard on National Public Radio edited by Linda Wertheimer (Houghton Mifflin: $14.95, 438 pp., illustrated). The news reports, interviews and commentaries in this anthology demonstrate what a valuable source of information NPR news programs have become since “All Things Considered” debuted in 1971. Some of the older pieces seem puzzling: Why were people so fascinated by Cabbage Patch dolls and Patty Hearst? But hindsight lends an ominous note to the initial reports about AIDS, the break-up of Yugoslavia and Watergate. Commentator Richard Strout could scarcely have imagined that the “discomfort and disillusion and cynicism” the Vietnam War generated among voters during the early ‘70s would last more than two decades. Commentaries by Andrei Codrescu, Bailey White and Vertamae Grosvenor leaven the more serious reportage.