WE INTERRUPT THIS BROADCAST: Relive the Events That Stopped Our Lives...from the Hindenburg to the Death of Princess Diana

A well-done if rather odd work. Garner, who has a lengthy background in radio and has produced a number of audio books, has now put together a mixed-media package, including both a book and two audio compact discs, documenting some of the century's moot extraordinary moments as they were first described by the electronic media. Ranging from the Hindenburg disaster to the death of Princess Diana, the book and its accompanying CDs (narrated by the television journalist Bill Kurtis) provide a swift, accurate, and vivid survey, likely to jog the memories of its audience. The drawback is, of course, that so many of the seminal events of the past seventy years didn't emerge as breaking news. What we are left with is not so much a record of the century's liminal moments as it is a survey of the way that the media handled particular events. Still, there's a thrill to hearing the first, often shocked or shaky announcement of John Glenn orbiting the earth, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon's resignation, the beginning of Desert Storm), and it's intriguing and instructive to follow the evolution of broadcast journalism. The fervid foreword by Walter Cronkite reminds readers of just how essential a free press has been in the evolution of the age.