This Is NPR: The First Forty Years

This celebration of National Public Radio comes in a snappy magazine style, full of short histories from familiar names. NPR's shaky start was fortified by the devotion of the few staffers working out of a small office in D.C. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 only included radio because of a push from broadcast veterans at the University of Michigan, but the CPB set aside a paltry 10% of funds for Public Radio. Stories such as these remind us that NPR existed, and exists, as a way for everyday voices to explain the world, rather than the stentorian tones of broadcast news. Sylvia Poggioli, Nina Totenberg, Renee Montagne, Cokie Roberts (who suggested that NPR attracted so many talented women because salaries were too low for men), and others were on the front lines of war coverage, reporting from Rwanda to Bosnia to Afghanistan; as a former NPR senior foreign editor put it, "You really never saw a reporting team made up mostly of women." It's fitting that the women, and the men, who built NPR should be the ones to present this retrospective illustrating just how much they have given us. (Dec.)