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“Science on the air” is an enjoyable and extremely well researched account of the origins of science programming in north American radio. From 1923 to the mid-50s, LaFollette takes us in a journey through the life and programs of many scientists, journalists and storytellers who chosed radio as a medium for science communication. A journey who allow the reader to visit many success, but also many incomprehension and missed opportunities, mainly by scientific institutions, who often failed to understand the potential of radio as a tool for science communication. It is a fully enjoyable journey, that leave the reader with an appetite to know how the US situation relates to other wonderful experiences around the world in the same years, and how those pioneer experiences influenced today's landscape. When browsing through the rich bibliography of Marcel LaFollette's book Science on the air, one immediately observe three main features. Only a handful of books or papers quoted are published after 2000; almost no reference point to science and technology studies or science communication studies; almost no reference concerns studies published outside the Anglo-Saxon world. These observations outline the three main drawbacks of the book. But it is worth coming back to them only after having reported about the pleasure of reading an informative, well documented, well written, intelligent account of a little known facet of science communication history. In another recent book about science in radio broadcasting (focused on Europe and on present time) we denounced the void that surrounds the analysis of the role of the radio in science communication, if compared with the analysis of other media such as television or science centres, quoting LaFollette's earlier works as a notable exception. This new book is therefore highly welcomed. The corpus of LaFollette research concentrates on the early history of science in radio broadcasting in the United States (with a chapter devoted to television: we will not discuss it here, as LaFollette is reportedly working on a full book about science and early television and we look forward to review it): the book “chronicles the efforts of [those] popularizers, from 1923 to the mid-1950s, as they negotiated for time on the air”. By applying all the best practices of a radio report, LaFollette transform a meticulous work in the archives of the Science Service agency and other science popularisation experiences on air into a captivating account of the efforts, the achievements and the ideologies of a number of fascinating men (and too few women, as she does not fail to underline...). If their efforts and their achievements is what makes the reading of the book truly enjoyable, it is their ideology, or more simply their views about the role of the radio in science communication, that is probably of specific interest for the Jcom reader. Thanks to this account, we can appreciate how many different views of science communication can exists and have existed or cohexisted over the years. According to Austin Hobart Clark, for example, a curator of the Smithsonian Institution to whom we owe one of the first science chronicles in American radio, in 1923, science talks on the radio “must be wholly accurate, dignified, and without reference to controversial points”, which would “discredit” science. A principle used to justify avoiding talking about evolution, for example. This view did not prevent Clark to establish a long lasting personal and professional friendship with Thornton Burgess, author of children books on nature, initiator of the Radio Nature League, who used the radio to mobilize young Americans in preservation efforts. Burgess (as

Science on air: a journey through early science programmes in US radio