This volume is more reportorial than scholarly. It is the product of an effort to collect and relate to one another the important facts about adult education by radio, past and present. I have had a limited time for this effort. Therefore I have attempted no research (although seeking to take account of that done by others), and have confined myself to reading, observing, interviewing, and listening to broadcasts. In the course of these activities I have spent several months in visiting radio stations in various parts of the country, from New York to Los Angeles, and have heard many hundreds of their programs. I have talked both with station and network officials, and with a large number of engineers, educators, and representatives of educational groups.

First published in 1991, this book presents a comprehensive annotated bibliography of radio broadcasting. Its eleven chapter-categories cover almost the entire range of radio broadcasting — with the exception of radio engineering due to its technical complexity although some of the historical volumes do encompass aspects, thus providing background material. Entries are primarily restricted to published books although a number of trade journals and periodicals are also included. Each entry includes full bibliographic information, including the ISBN or ISSN where available, and an annotation written by the author with the original text in hand.

Tells how radio and television became an integral part of American life, of how a toy became an industry and a force in politics, business, education, religion, and international affairs.

The proliferation of book clubs, reading groups, "outline" volumes, and new forms of book reviewing in the first half of the twentieth century influenced the tastes and pastimes of millions of Americans. Joan Rubin here provides the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, the rise of American middlebrow culture, and the values encompassed by it. Rubin centers her discussion on five important expressions of the middlebrow: the founding of the Book-of-the-Month Club; the beginnings of "great books" programs; the creation of the New York Herald Tribune's book-review section; the popularity of such works as Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy; and the emergence of literary radio programs. She also investigates the lives and expectations of the individuals who shaped these middlebrow institutions--such figures as Stuart Pratt Sherman, Irita Van Doren, Henry Seidel Canby, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, John Erskine, William Lyon Phelps, Alexander Woollcott, and Clifton Fadiman. Moreover, as she pursues the significance of these cultural intermediaries who connected elites and the masses by interpreting ideas to the public, Rubin forces a reconsideration of the boundary between high culture and popular sensibility.