Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound (review)

"We are living in the golden age of radio documentary," declared Columbia University journalism professor Samuel F. Freedman in 2003; and co-editor John Biewen—in quoting Freedman in his introduction to this book—aims to help us appreciate and understand this golden age (3). This is a book with much to teach us about nonfiction audio storytelling and the important place of oral history in sonic narrative composition. For oral historians who want to take their work into the more public world of broadcast radio and Internet podcasting, this is an excellent place to begin. Reality Radio will not teach you all the fine points of radio-quality interviewing, the subtle techniques of audio editing, or the art of writing for radio (though it comes quite close at times). What it will do is inspire you to take your recordings and transform them into compelling sonic stories of all sorts: historical, artistic, and journalistic.

In twenty-one highly autobiographical essays (including Rick Moody's preface and Biewen's introduction), some of the finest practitioners of broadcast aural storytelling describe and celebrate their craft in the course of exploring their personal inspirations, aspirations, and artisanship. They not only write about their work but also—through a Web site set up by the authors to accompany the book—they make their work available for readers and the general public (http://realityradiobook.org/audio-links). This is as it should be in a book about audio composition.

Reality Radio surveys a variety of approaches to audio documentary work— from the heavily oral history-based work of the Kitchen Sisters, the thematically based, multiple narratives of Ira Glass (producer of This American Life), the acoustically rich exploration of space, place, and spirit of Jad Abumrad (co-host and producer of Radio Lab) to the tightly structured first-person narratives by Sherre DeLys, Alan Hall, and Joe Richman, as well as the blending of journalism and voyeurism in damali ayo's aural explorations of attitudes about race. Among the many different approaches, some documentarians gravitate toward journalistic models (Maria Martin), others are more heavily influenced by post-modern, interventionist art modes (damali ayo), while yet others try to bring the voices of the very young to radio (Joe Richman, Karen Michel, and David Isay have excellent pieces that showcase youth and teen life). Numerous lessons abound here for oral historians who want to move into sonic public history: where to discover inspiration; how to identify, develop, and structure stories that appeal and move listening audiences; and how to interview for aural production (yes, it is more interventionist and explicitly collaborative; you can ask your interviewee to repeat a tale with greater detail, or without assuming a listener's prior knowledge, or in a first-person voice describing action as it unfolded). You might pick up pointers on when and when not to use narration and why (and how to use it if you choose to).

These and many more lessons are imbedded in the contributors' accounts of their lives and approaches to their work; they are not offered up in handbook style. Take Sandy Tolan's lessons, for example. As a long-time producer of international documentary programs and senior producer of Working, a series of worker profiles that aired on NPR's Marketplace, he has come to learn that fashioning effective documentaries is about finding the story and the right characters to tell it: "The documentary functions best when it is not merely a long piece of fact-jammed journalism but a nonfiction drama set on an audio stage with scenes, characters, narrative arc, dramatic tensions, and even silence. Above all it is the characters—the voices—that convey the deepest emotional truth in our medium." Hence, "casting" the documentary is one of the primary challenges for a documentarian and working with your central characters is, according to Tolan, more like the work...