Once upon a Telephone: An Illustrated Social History
Stern (The Good Heart Diet Cookbook, LJ 1/15/82) and Gwathmey (Ticket to Paradise, LJ 11/15/91) have collected ephemera, anecdotes, and excerpts about the telephone. Movie stills, magazine covers, greeting cards, and sheet music are included, along with quotes ranging from Carl Sandburg to Nicholson Baker, from Dorothy Parker to Emily Post. The breezy text, nearly obscured by the lavish illustrations and generous quotes, provides an adequate chronicle of the invention of the telephone, the evolution of telephone equipment, and the development of telephone books and pay phones. Chapters cover telephone operators, telephones and teenagers, and the telephone's importance to business and romance. This book is a delightful romp through 20th-century American social history, and it succeeds in portraying the telephone as ubiquitous in popular culture. For public libraries.Wendy Knickerbocker, Rhode Island Coll. Lib., ProvidenceCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.