• Living Through a Communications Revolution(Media Marathon: A Twentieth-Century Memoir,
  by Eric Barnouw '29)
• Considering the Soviet Union and Russia
  (At a Century's Ending: Reflections, 1982-1995,
  by George F. Kennan '25)
• Short Takes
  
  • (The Voter's Guide to Election Polls, by Michael W. Traugott '65 and Paul J. Lavrakas
  • The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics, by Arthur W. Frank '68)
• Books Received

LIVING THROUGH A COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION
Erik Barnouw '29 chronicles his adventures in radio, TV, film, books, music, and theater

Media Marathon: A Twentieth-Century Memoir
Erik Barnouw '29
Duke University Press, $22.95
Erik Barnouw '29's prodigious career has included work in radio, television, animated and documentary film, books, music, and theater. "For decades, I kept on the go between them, without a sense of direction," he writes in his autobiography, Media Marathon: A Twentieth-Century Memoir. "Then, after World War II, communications became a buzzword and suddenly exploded around us. . . . It was reassuring: my peripatetic life seemed to have meaning. I gathered I had been living in a communications revolution."
Barnouw went on to become one of the foremost chroniclers of that revolution, writing a three-volume History of Broadcasting in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1966-70), a condensed version, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television (Oxford University Press, 1990), and other works while serving as a professor at Columbia University and as the first director of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress. Media Marathon is, in a sense, a more personal version of the history of broadcasting, one that shows the human side of the days when radio was king, television was new, and documentary films still made a difference.
Despite its name, the book is not a marathon; it's more of a relay race, with each chapter introducing a new character with whom Barnouw worked. The cast includes the timelessly famous, such as Josh Logan '31, whom Barnouw brought into the Triangle Club; Pearl S. Buck, who studied radio writing under Barnouw at Columbia; Lynn Fontanne, who asked Barnouw to write a television play for her; and Dwight Eisenhower, who as Columbia's president gave crucial backing to a syphilis-education program for radio that Barnouw produced in 1948, when such things simply weren't talked about on the air. Also present are those whose celebrity was brief and only dimly remembered: One of the most affecting chapters is on Billy Halop, a child star who played the title character on the 1930s radio western Bobby Benson and the H-Bar-O Ranch. He went on to a marginal acting career, battled alcoholism, and died at age 56. "I felt sure that the death had not been wholly involuntary," Barnouw writes.
Barnouw was employed by an advertising agency when he produced and directed Bobby Benson and other programs on the NBC and CBS radio networks. This was standard practice in the early 1930s: Advertisers didn't merely buy 30 seconds within a program, they bought a quarter- or half-hour and supplied an entire program, advertisements already inserted, to the network-the forerunner of today's infomercials. And the programs were designed to market the sponsor's product in ways obvious and subtle. The Bobby Benson ranch was named after a breakfast cereal, H-O Oats; its name, if used as a cattle brand, would be pronounced "H-Bar-O." Hats, pins, and scarves with the ranch's logo which the show sent to its young fans advertised the cereal. (Sixty years later, similar merchandising tie-ins would be attacked as an insidious new trend aimed at exploiting children.)
Barnouw's broadcasting history was richly detailed, amply footnoted, and a tiny bit ponderous. Here, freed of the strictures of academic writing, he flashes what must surely be one of the century's driest wits while revealing how deeply he was involved personally in some of the incidents he chronicled. For example, Volume 2 of the broadcasting history relates a 1936 episode in which an eccentric magazine publisher, Bernarr Macfadden, demanded that broadcasters announce his "candidacy" for the presidency of the United States. His advertising agen-cy eventually arranged for Macfadden to read a Red Cross message during a show he was sponsoring and introduced him as someone "often mentioned for the Presidency."
The story behind the story is told in Media Marathon: It was Barnouw, working for the advertising agency, who had to figure out a way to get Macfadden's "candidacy" on the air and came up with the Red Cross idea. "This plan was accepted, and so I had the honor of receiving our sponsor at the studio and, at the proper moment, conducting him to the microphone to speak his piece," Barnouw writes. "He was smaller and frailer than I expected. The political world showed no sign of noticing the event. The agency probably felt a bit surer of its Macfadden account."
Such tales will delight anyone old enough to remember the participants, and intrigue those of any age who are interested in how the media affect society. For them, Barnouw adds some concluding ruminations on the dangers he sees in the evolving world of media: the trend toward inventions such as the Internet that discourage face-to-face human interaction, and the ways in which media could be used to pacify the increasing number of people left unemployed in the name of technological and economic "efficiency." But he also has an optimistic message to those undergraduates and recent alumni who find themselves adrift in a strange world of new media. "Today students are urged to have a career goal and to plan steps toward it," he writes. "Amid constant change, how can they? Some of the media with which I became involved did not exist when I began; others seemed to be dying. There was no plan in my journey."
-Alan Flippen '84
Alan Flippen is an editor at The New York Times and a trustee of WPRB; his journalism has appeared in newspapers and magazines and on radio, television, and the Internet.

CONSIDERING THE SOVIET UNION AND RUSSIA
Considering the Soviet Union and Russia
At a Century's Ending:
Reflections, 1982-1995
George F. Kennan '25
W. W. Norton, $27.50
In the spring of 1953 a new and ideologically oriented secretary of state, John Foster Dulles '08, ousted from government the best-known career diplomat of the day, George F. Kennan '25. Dulles's act, which was roundly criticized, was a blessing in disguise. Deprived of his original profession, Kennan ventured forth on one of the most prolific and distinguished literary careers of our time.
At a Century's Ending is the most recent of Kennan's score of books. It is a collection of previously published articles and reviews, unpublished speeches, a personal letter, and a diary entry. This is not Kennan's most coherent or important book. But there is much to be learned here about his principal subject, the former Soviet Union and the czarist Russia it inhabited, and about Kennan himself.
A former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Kennan writes with clarity and insight about the Russians, whom he has known so long and well. In the early Reagan years when the U.S. government jumped to dire conclusions about the imminent threat posed by Soviet power, Kennan objected strenuously. The book contains one of his most notable speeches-a May 1983 Washington address-which described a government report exaggerating Soviet strength as "inexcusably childish." I was in the audience that day and well recall the riveting sense of concern on hearing Kennan declare that, in part because of American misperceptions, the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be on a "march toward war."
As Kennan acknowledges with chagrin at several places in this collection, his own eloquence 50 years ago was somewhat responsible for the U.S. policies he eventually opposed. The perception of a Soviet menace to the United States in the early post-World War II years was greatly advanced by his famous Long Telegram from Moscow in February 1946. In the current volume, Kennan regrets that his powerful dispatch inspired "a strain of emotional and self-righteous anti-Sovietism that in later years I wish I had not aroused." The impact of the Long Telegram was exceeded by that of his 1946 memorandum to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal '15, which was the first to advocate "containment" of the Soviet Union. Kennan watched in horror over the years as his words became the touchstone of a policy of military confrontation of which he disapproved.
As this history suggests, Kennan is likely to be remembered more as a man of the pen than as a diplomat or policymaker. He himself has observed that writing, whether as a foreign-service officer, historian, or commentator, has constituted "the backbone of my professional life." If any further evidence is needed, the current collection attests to his articulateness and narrative skill on a broad range of subjects.
-Don Oberdorfer '52
Don Oberdorfer, a former Washington Post diplomatic correspondent, is journalist in residence at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. A longer version of this review originally appeared in The Washington Post.

SHORT TAKES
The Voter's Guide to Election Polls
Michael W. Traugott '65
and Paul J. Lavrakas
Chatham House Publishers, $19.95 paper
A 1993 poll conducted by the Roper Organization suggested that almost a quarter of all Americans had doubts about whether the Holocaust ever occurred. A shocking and regrettable conclusion to be sure, but it was also a false one, arrived at as the result of a double negative left in the survey question when it was translated from the original French into English. When the wording was later simplified, the measure of America's ignorance quickly fell in line with those of European countries-between one and five percent.
As polling experts Michael W. Traugott '65 and Paul J. Lavrakas illustrate in their timely and informative collaboration, the doublenegative is only one example among many of the "nonos" of survey research. Political polling being their chief concern, they feel that "[polls'] potential for harming democracy seems to manifest itself routinely." Confronted with an increasing supply of deliberately manipulated private polls on the one hand, and an equally insidious torrent of "horse-race" polls on the other, the public badly needs an education both in the processes of survey research and in the media, which report the results.
To this end, the authors suggest we demand answers of our interrogators. Their book furnishes an ample list of what to ask this voting season. Start with, "Who sponsored this poll?"
-K. Thomas MacFarlane '88
Thomas MacFarlane is a freelance writer living in Philadelphia.

The Wounded Storyteller:
Body, Illness and Ethics
Arthur W. Frank '68
University of Chicago Press, $19.95 paper
Everyone in our aging population either has a life-threatening illness or knows someone who . . . So Arthur W. Frank '68's work on dealing with disease will interest many readers. A specialist in the sociology of medicine, he suffered a heart attack at 39 and was subsequently afflicted with testicular cancer. Out of this agony he has produced two books that shed light on living with diseases.
In At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness (Houghton Mifflin, 1991) he told his story in deeply personal terms. In his latest book, The Wounded Storyteller, he broadens his scope, examining how disease enormously disrupts everyday life, how it changes one's view of life, and how people react to it.
Frank maps out three main strategies for responding to disease. (1) Chaos: The patient doesn't understand what is happening and collaborates with doctors in labeling his or her reaction to the disease "depression." This approach helps about as much as relabeling a backache "lumbago." (2) Restitution: This relentlessly optimistic approach is redolent of pharmaceutical commercials. The patient thinks: "I was healthy, I'll take the right medicine, and I'll be as good as new." For some lucky patients it works out this way. Even so, the patient's denial inhibits the possibility of insight. (3) Quest: Instead of running, the patient faces up to the disease, and grows. A hard path, it is the one Frank has chosen, and his books point the way for the rest of us.
-Malcolm L. Diamond
A professor of religion, emeritus, Malcolm Diamond wrote about coping with cancer in the April 6, 1994 PAW.

BOOKS RECEIVED
Coloniality in the Cliff Swallow: The Effect of Group Size
on Social Behavior
Charles R. Brown *85 and Mary Bomberger Brown
University of Chicago Press,
$95 cloth, $34.95 paper

Obstetrics, Gynecology and
Infertility: Resident Survival Guide and Handbook for Clinicians
John D. Gordon '85 et al.
Scrub Hill Press, 1328 American Way, Menlo Park, CA 94025. $12.95 paper

Environmental Activism and
World Civic Politics
Paul Wapner *91
State University of New York Press, $16.95 paper

Beyond Ontological Blackness:
An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism
Victor Anderson *92
Continuum Publishing Group, $22.95

Baked Potatoes: A Pot Smoker's Guide to Film & Video
Michael Wexler '92 and John Hulme
Main Street/Doubleday, $10 paper

Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and
Institutional Change Since
the Great Leap Famine
Dali L. Yang *93
Stanford University Press, $49.50

Sixty Years of Biology: Essays
on Evolution and Development
John Tyler Bonner
(biology professor, emeritus)
Princeton University Press, $24.95

The Honey Bee
James L. Gould (professor of ecology
and evolutionary biology)
and Carol Grant Gould
Scientific American Library,
$19.95 paper

Paul Muldoon [professor of
the Council of the Humanities
and creative writing]
Tim Kendall
Dufour Editions,
$29.95 cloth, $14.95 paper

Hadrian's Villa and Its Legacy
John Pinto (art and archaeology
professor) and William L. MacDonald
Yale University Press, $55

Universe Down to Earth
Neil de Grasse Tyson (lecturer in astrophysical sciences)
Columbia University Press,
$14.95 paper