* Beadle, Mary E. And Michael D. Murray (Eds.) (2001) Indelible Images: Women of Local Television. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press. pp. 248 * Keith, Michael C. (2001). Sounds in the Dark: All Night Radio in American Life. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press. pp. 242 The literature of American broadcasting has brought to light celebrities and subjects of all sorts. Yet, until recently two dark corners have been largely left hidden from view. The rise of women in local television, and the stars of nighttime radio may no longer languish in obscurity with the recent publication of two books. Professors Mary E. Beadle and Michael D. Murray have drawn together a tribute to tough-minded women who committed themselves to developing their local TV stations. Of the 19 portraits painted in Indelible Images, several women appear to be first in their respective fields, and four individuals stand out as significant. The Brooklyn native who led the fight for educational television in Washington, D.C. will be familiar to many broadcast scholars. Freida Hennock was the first woman to sit on the Federal Communications Commission, and pitted her will against both fellow commissioners and commercial broadcasters. She secured the federal allocation for noncommercial channels in the early days of television, and helped to sign on the nation's first educational TV station, KURT, in Houston. Another pioneer in public broadcasting, Philadelphia's Martha Gable joined Hennock's fight on Capitol Hill to reserve educational channels. She also laid the cornerstone for public broadcasting at WHYY. Gable's speeches on behalf of educational TV in San Francisco created the climate for licensing KQED, a flagship of the PBS fleet. In the chapters on broadcast journalism, two Indelible Image women stand up for principles. Kneeland, news vice president of KVUE-TV (ABC) in Austin, Texas, set a criteria for crime coverage to the flow of adrenaline in the Austin newsroom when police radios crackled with domestic violence reports and assorted mayhem. Kneeland's policy caught on at a few TV newsrooms, but failed to become a model - perhaps due to the pressures of the slow news day. Graduates of KVUE-TV's newsroom still boast they attended Carole Kneeland University. Even her former news director in Dallas described it -- only half jokingly - as one of the five best journalism schools in the country. Carol Marin's crusade for quality TV journalism in Chicago also proves to be instructive. The tale of her differences with Joel Cheatwood, vice president of news for NBC, illustrates how corporate executives may filter their preferences for sensational news personnel and practices. When WMAQ-TV hired in 1997 as its editorial commentator Jerry Springer, the ringmaster of talk shows, Marin and her co-anchor Ron Magers walked off the set. Three years later, Marin returned to anchoring the news, this time joining Chicago's WBBM-TV (CBS). She remodeled her late-night newscast and brought newsmakers on the set and indepth reports to the screen. This new look boosted the ratings at first, and the show rose to second place in its time slot. Chicago viewers, however, soon grew weary of long-form news, and Marin's noble experiment was cancelled fewer than nine months later. Indelible Images develops 15 other biographies including those of anchors, film reviewers, talk-show hosts, a sportscaster, and a station owner. …