Customer Reviews

The Encyclopedia of American Radio: An A-Z Guide to Radio from Jack Benny to Howard Stern

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Nice photos, but how much faith can you put into the text when simple errors stick out like sore thumbs

For instance:

Man Called X: Ken Thurston did not have a girlfriend and had nothing to do with the Cafe Tamborine (that was an entirely different program.)

Jack Moyles did NOT replace Frank Sinatra as Rocky Fortune. That series ended when Sinatra left it. Moyles DID star in Rocky Jordan, an entirely different show.

It is little things like this and make the book suspect for me. How many more errors are in this book? What can one take as fact and not with a grain of salt?

Excellent concept, faulty execution. I would not buy this book again and am considering returning my copy for credit. I do not consider this book to be a valuable reference item. Casual reading yes...reference work...no

As the former editor of an Old-Time Radio club newsletter, a writer for several other Old-Time Radio clubs, and an Old-Time Radio researcher, I know that careful research is an important step in the writing of accurate factual material.

While this book is an improvement over its predecessor, "Same Time, Same Station," there are still too many factual errors in this book for it to warrant consideration as an Old-Time Radio "Encyclopedia."

A few examples of factual errors.

It was Virginia Christine and not Virginia Gregg who appeared the motion pictures "Judgement at Nuremberg" and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." Janet Waldo did not play Alice in the Disney classic "Alice in Wonderland;" Kathryn Beaumont played Alice. Janet Waldo played Alice in the Hanna-Barbera 1966 version of "Alice in Wonderland."

These are easily verifiable facts and yet the author got them wrong.

I verified that Virginia Gregg did not and that Virginia Christine did appear in the preceding two motion pictures by checking the cast credits of the movies in several motion picture reference books.

I verified my facts on "Alice in Wonderland" by checking the Disney and Hanna-Barbera cast lists and by talking to Janet Waldo about her role as Alice during the course of an interview.

I cannot recommend this book.

One's money would be better spent by purchasing John Dunning's "On The Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio."

Mr. Lackmann has improved this book very much from the earlier edition which was loaded with made up facts and apparently little research. Mr. Lackmann, in his acknowledgements, though has not given credit to the many readers who had written him to correct his mistaken information. He acts as if somehow these facts were miraculously corrected by themselves. There are better reference books on radio than this one. Don't waste your time.

The only useful thing about this infuriating -- and inaccurate-- book is the selection of photos. Otherwise, get Dunning.

As others have already mentioned, there are many errors throughout this book and most of them are due to sloppiness, carelessness, or maybe laziness. Most of the mistakes that I have come across, including titles, years, names of people involved, program lengths, would be easily fixed. OF course it becomes overwhelming when you realize that if somebody who isn't even a radio historian has spotted that many mistakes, there must be hundreds more that I'm not even aware of.

But just as bothersome as the many glaring factual errors is the emphasis in the write ups of each program. A great deal of importance is placed on the names of the announcers and the sponsors, sometimes taking up a large portion of the thumbnail sketch, while very little is said about the nature of the actual program; the writers, the storylines, the changes undergone by the show; for instance that Burns and Allen went from being a somewhat surrealistic show about two people who were in a show together but were not romantically involved to being a show about a married couple that took place in their home (and not at the studio) seems to me to be something worth mentioning.

Ron Lackmann's The Encyclopedia Of American Radio provides a dictionary of American radio history which includes synopses of hundreds of shows, broadcast histories and air times, and analyses of the influence of writing and network decision-making processes on radio content and distribution. An excellent reference.

Ron Lackmann's Encyclopedia of American Radio is a great book to have in a library. The descriptions of the celebrated radio programs of the past and the hundreds of short biographies of many of the most popular radio actors of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, as well as those of several current radio performers, are informative and clearly and simply written. Most important, this is a fine reference book for anyone who wants to read about "old time" radio. The photographs in the book are really excellent and I have never seen most of them anywhere else before, in spite of the fact that I have read about old time radio extensively. This is a good book for young people who want to learn more about a radio show or a performer of the past they might have heard about in passing. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in entertainment of the past.

Ron Lackmann's Encyclopedia of American Radio is a wonderfuul and useful book about Old Time Radio. It is the only book I have found on the subject that gives both show descriptions and biographies of many major radio personalities. I have found other books that are filled with far many more errors than are found in this book, and yet those books seem to get favorable reviews from certain somewhat bitter people. I have been told that authors writing for vanity publishers often write favorable reviews for their own books on similar sujects and nasty picky criticisms of other people's books on similar subjects in order to undermine work done by others. How awful. I found the illustrations in Lackmann's Radio Encyclopedia especially nostalgic and very provocative of a time gone by. I understand the bvook won the POpular Culture award as Best Reference book for 1997...which was well deserved. The extensive APPendices is also most impressive.

This book, The Encyclopedia of American Radio, is an excellent, comprehensive compilation of facts and photos relating to radio shows and personalities of the past that were part of Radio's Golden Age...the thirties, forties and fifties. It is a very fond look back at those days when we all gathered around the family radio and listened to such great shows as The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, The Lux Radio Theater, Jack Benny, et al. The amount of information given in this book is vast and the Appendices, which lists hundreds of dramatic anthology shows and personalities not given separate entries in the book, is extensive. An amazing achievememnt and it is Fun to read and not dull, which is more than I can say for other less well written Radio Encyclopedias that have been published in the last few years. Congratulations, Mr. Lackmann, for a job well done.

This book, The Encyclopedia of American Radio, is an excellent, comprehensive compilation of facts and photos relating to radio shows and personalities of the past that were part of Radio's Golden Age...the thirties, forties and fifties. It is a very fond look back at those days when we all gathered around the family radio and listened to such great shows as The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, The Lux Radio Theater, Jack Benny, et al. The amount of information given in this book is vast and the Appendices, which lists hundreds of dramatic anthology shows and personalities not given separate entries in the book, is extensive. An amazing achievememnt and it is Fun to read and not dull, which is more than I can say for other less well written Radio Encyclopedias that have been published in the last few years. Congratulations, Mr. Lackmann, for a job well done.