Monday, October 10, 7pm – Non-Fiction
Bob Edwards
author of A Voice in the Box: My Life in Radio ($21.95 University of Kentucky Press)
The host of The Bob Edwards Show and Bob Edwards Weekend on Sirius XM Radio, Bob Edwards became the first radio personality with a large national audience to take his chances in the new field of satellite radio. The programs’ mix of long-form interviews and news documentaries has won many prestigious awards.
For thirty years, Louisville native Edwards was the voice of National Public Radio’s daily newsmagazine programs, co-hosting All Things Considered before launching Morning Edition in 1979. These programs built NPR’s national audience while also bringing Edwards to national prominence. In 2004, however, NPR announced that it would be finding a replacement for Edwards, inciting protests from tens of thousands of his fans and controversy among his listeners and fellow broadcasters. Today, Edwards continues to inform the American public with a voice known for its sincerity, intelligence, and wit.
In A Voice in the Box: My Life in Radio, Edwards recounts his career as one of the most important figures in modern broadcasting. He describes his road to success on the radio waves, from his early days knocking on station doors during college and working for American Forces Korea Network to his work at NPR and induction into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2004. Edwards tells the story of his exit from NPR and the launch of his new radio ventures on the XM Satellite Radio network. Throughout the book, his sharp observations about the people he interviewed and covered and the colleagues with whom he worked offer a window on forty years of American news and on the evolution of public journalism.
A Voice in the Box is an insider’s account of the world of American media and a fascinating, personal narrative from one of the most iconic personalities in radio history.
Bob Edwards is the author of Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism and Fridays with Red: A Radio Friendship. Edwards has been awarded the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award for radio journalism, a George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting, and the Edward R. Murrow Award for outstanding contributions to public radio. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.
“Bob Edwards has made me proud to be a colleague in a field that both of us consider a calling and for which he has set the highest of standards for all of us who look up to him…At last, Bob Edwards has told his story. With all the wit, candor, and courage that made his journalism on NPR a favorite of millions across the country and a role model for all of us in public media. This “voice in the box” is good news.”–Bill Moyers
“Bob Edwards came of age as radio did. Maybe not the much-romanticized golden era of the medium that preceded television, but the equally important period when radio news and public affairs reporting grew and matured into one of the most relevant American venues for information and serious discussion. His work at NPR and later, with satellite radio, is testament to his love of good journalism, great storytelling and, most of all, people. A Voice In The Box is his story to be sure, but it is also a worthy tale of high-end radio journalism itself–all the more important to us in these days when newspapers and television news have lost so much of their ambition.”–David Simon, producer, “The Wire” and “Treme” and author, Homicide and The Corner
“A Voice in the Box is a delight. Bob Edwards has told his story from inside the world of radio that has something for everybody—from the kid’s dream to be on radio to settling some adult’s scores with NPR and being happy now on Sirius XM Radio with many more hours on the radio still to come.”—Jim Lehrer
