Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2012 April 13 • Friday

This was a bit of a disappointment. The writing is never better than adequate and there's hardly any original material.

Gallop sets the scene by describing both the role of radio in the 1930s and Orson Welles's careers in both radio and theatre at the time.

For information about Welles's life up to and including Citizen Kane, there probably isn't a better book to read than Simon Callow's The Road to Xanadu, which Gallop mentions at least twice and includes in his bibliography.

The best book that exists about Welles's famous War of the Worlds broadcast must be Hadley Cantril's The Invasion from Mars, first published in 1940.

When Gallop attempts to sketch Bernard Herrmann's biography in a few paragraphs in the book's last chapter, he makes enough errors to discourage me from relying on this volume as a reference. (He wrote that Herrmann "composed memorable music" for The Birds and died in 1965, for instance.)

So what's good about this book? For one thing, it includes a fair amount of material from primary sources: newspaper articles, letters, photographs from the author's collection and even photocopies of some pages of Howard Koch's script for The War of the Worlds. I'll probably keep it on my shelf for those alone.

Gallop also knows a lot about radio and is able to locate Welles in the context of the airwaves. Even if I didn't especially enjoy his book, I'll give him credit for that.

But if you've read The Road to Xanadu and The Invasion from Mars, there really isn't much in this book for you.