Media marathon

Media history is his subject, and, as this memoir makes so delightfully clear, it has also been Erik Barnouw's life. Barnouw's story, told with wit and charm in Media Marathon, is the story of American culture adjusting to the twentieth century, of new media repeatedly displacing the old in a century-long competitive upheaval. Born in Holland in 1908 and an immigrant to the United States at the age of eleven, Barnouw spent his early working years in an astounding array of occupations - actor and stage manager, lyricist, translator, director, producer, teacher, and union official. This varied…