cover image Radios: Short Takes on Life and Culture

Radios: Short Takes on Life and Culture

Jerome Stern. W. W. Norton & Company, $20 (112pp) ISBN 978-0-393-04119-4

These pieces, mostly broadcast on National Public Radio's All Things Considered by the late Jerome Stern, are indeed mini essays. They are so short, twinkling and offhand that the reader, left with only the printed word, misses the sound of a voice, the inflections that position the wit and calibrate the sentence. Stern picks subjects far and wide, taking possession of them all. He talks about the sanctuary of libraries where no one asks, ""Have you cleaned out the catbox yet?"" and the joy of books: ""I must sing the song of the book, for nothing more voluptuous do I know than sitting with bright pictures, fat upon my lap."" He muses of doctors, the idiocies of airplane travel and the brief lives of goldfish. He even turns his eye on his own illness from cancer: ""I faint, passing out into a dream of dreaming. This makes me feel wonderful, but must alarm the doctor.... He prefers conversations to melodrama."" Collected in this slim volume are the words of a voice now still (Stern died in March 1996) that those who tuned into his quirky, somehow rational flights of verbal fancy will not soon forget. (Aug.)