There has never been a better time to study the early years of radio. Thanks to the labor of a small but brilliant cohort of scholars concerned with radio and mediated sound in general, the past thirty years have seen (or rather heard) two crucial developments. First, these scholars have established a dynamic vocabulary for analyzing early broadcasting as a historical, social, and aesthetic phenomenon. Second, they have also given media scholars who might otherwise have downplayed the sound of radio the critical momentum to investigate it: its strategies of acoustic representation, how it told stories and addressed its listeners, and how subjects experienced it. Neil Verma's Theater of the Mind builds on these two foundations. It follows the path of such scholars as Carolyn Marvin, Susan Douglas, Michele Hilmes, Jason Loviglio, Robert McChesney, and Alison McCracken in portraying radio as cultural currency and uncovering how it was used and made to signify by individual listeners, groups, corporations, and governments. It also continues to explore the sonic qualities and aesthetics of electrically mediated sounds themselves, a task that R. Murray Schafer, Jonathan Sterne, Michal Bull, and others have taken up in parallel to the key film sound theories formulated by Rick Altman, Claudia Gorbman, Michel Chion, James Lastra, and others. Verma's combined approach to wartime and postwar US radio makes acoustics and the construction of a point of audition matter as much as Raymond Williams's concern with how communities are formed and power is situated by the social act of broadcasting. On Verma's account, radio drama is an event that by nature constructs and comments upon its listener and the parameters of its signifying process.

In this, Verma ambitiously attempts no less than to do for radio drama what Jacques Attali did for sound itself in his magisterial book Noise (1985), and to do it as concretely as possible by listening to thousands of hours of recorded dramas with a keen ear for patterns that few listeners possess today, despite the thirty-year reign of radio serials and plays as broadcasting's hottest commodities. In Verma's own words, radio drama was a “laboratory in which shared meanings – including ideas about mediation itself – were drawn in, examined, and refashioned before reemerging into public understanding in a sequence of events that was just as messy and recursive as it sounds” (12). This sentence well represents both Verma's intrepidity as a media historian and his skills as a philosopher of mediation in modernity. There is no trend in radio drama too messy for Verma to approach, break down to its constituent parts, and make audible for us its acoustic and political resonances. Like Attali's book, Verma's is intensely political, concerned to expose the part played by radio drama in “producing the publics that today resolutely believe that televisions and computers … shape or even ordain interiority” (223). Era is everything here: from the global Depression of the 1930s through the Second World War and the American anticommunist mania of the following decades, the individual's positioning as a citizen of family, community, and nation was continually hashed out in politics, the press, and everyday discourse. Verma's point is that radio played a key role in producing, maintaining, and at times countermanding dominant, yet time-bound, constructions of citizenship. Radio drama thus implies cultural models of mind as interiority, as social subject, and as itself a medium where inner and outer minds meet. These models in turn enable Verma to make convincing arguments about how the shifts in theme and soundscape design illuminate the possibilities and limits of mediated subjectivity imagined during each of the three decades he treats.

Briefly, Verma makes three interconnected arguments in three sections. First, he defines drama of the Great Depression as a “drama of space and time” that varied between “intimate” and “kaleidosonic” modes of positioning the listener as simultaneously empathetic and democratic in outlook. (Verma smartly calls this production of “perspective” in radio audiopositioning rather than borrowing film studies' clunkier term “point of audition.”) Next, the propaganda imperatives of the Second World War quickly transformed radio from “a force binding together a nation” to something “more like a weapon to impose belief” (13). Finally, dramas produced during the postwar red scare radically challenged the “intuitive connection between communication and the mind that was established in wartime radio” (202). At a time when Americans' understanding of speech acts in general revolved around the notion of “testimony” as something less expressive of subjectivity than of the political significance of the facts that testimony reveals, this brave new definition of mind isolates the subject's interiority and renders it unknowable, even to the subject herself. This narrative takes the reader from the New Deal allegories of collectivity produced by Archibald MacLeish and Irving Reis (The Fall of the City (1937)) and Orson Welles's Mercury Theater on the Air through Arch Oboler's experimental narratives that define subjectivity by its capacity for self-isolation and dissimulation (I Was a Communist for the FBI, discussed before but imagined anew here) and police procedural dramas where guilt and innocence come unhinged from any possibility of intent or its communication (Dragnet). Through all these discussions, Verma displays impressive facility at entwining sonic, social, and psychological theory without backing into preconstituted critical categories. For example, it's almost a surprise when Freud finally appears in the third section, though Verma employs him as historical touchstone for thinking through post-traumatic stress and myths of “red” brainwashing rather than as sponsor of psychoanalytic theory.

The book won the 2013 First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (US), and deservedly so. I can think of no monograph on mediated sound since Sterne's The Audible Past (2003) that charts so many exciting avenues of scholarship while building upon the tremendous work that precedes his study. That's not to say that there are no snags. The book occasionally reminds us of its status as a first book, for example when it overstates its cases. I wonder why Verma insists, contrary to preceding scholarship as well as popular memory, that radio drama production “explod[ed] … well into the 1950s” (169) when even the graph he provides seems to demonstrate a tiny rise followed quickly by a precipitous fall; the preponderance or lack thereof of drama as a radio genre has little impact on his claims for its significance. I would also hope that a scholar so meticulous, especially one so invested in Welles's Mercury Theater as a sonic phenomenon, would spell the great Joseph Cotten's name correctly. These noises, however, do not drown out Verma's achievement. Any scholar or critic invested in the soundscapes and cultures of postwar media within or without the US – cinema, radio, television, print, and even such post-postwar audiovisual media as the home computer and the smartphone – must hereafter contend with the concepts so richly developed in Theater of the Mind.