Over its twenty-year history National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" has become a landmark American program, a unique source of news and of voices from across the country that don't often get a hearing elsewhere. In these pages, Noah Adams captures a year in the life of "All Things Considered", and celebrates the special pleasures of the show: its original blend of frontline news reporting, commentary, and features; its spirited attention to the highways and the byways of American life; and the people - "All Things Considered" staff and listeners alike - who make it all happen. The year's stories take us from China to Romania and from Alaska to Appalachia, from the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe to a West Virginia fire department's ramp supper fundraiser. Along the way we look in on musicians, writers, farmers, and bungee jumpers; we go whale watching and lighthouse hunting; and we ride the rails from St. Paul to Seattle on the "Empire Builder" train. We see how the broadcast is put together by a team of reporters, technicians, and announcers determined to bring us the news straight from the source, without distortions and simplifications. We learn how "All Things Considered" and National Public Radio got their starts, and how Noah Adams came to join them both. And we hear a lifetime's worth of stories of radio work gone (sometimes) just right and (occasionally) hilariously wrong. Most of all we meet people on both sides of the radio who we're glad to know, listeners from all across the country and the "All Things Considered" reporters - Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg, John Hockenberry, Deborah Amos, Susan Stamberg, and others - who have become as familiar to us, and astrusted, as neighbors across the back fence. As engaging and varied as the program it chronicles, here is a must-read for every fan of what Time calls "the most literate, trenchant, and entertaining news program on the radio".