Enough books have been written about Toscanini - more, quite likely, than any other conductor has inspired - to make one wonder if another is necessary. Some of those books, however, were produced during the conductor's lifetime and consequently lack the perspective that time alone can provide. Moreover, none involves a close study of his seventeen years (1937-1954) at NBC, the last and longest professional association of his unprecedented sixty-eight-year career. Those years have, of course, been discussed. Sometimes they were excessively praised, other times they were deemed an inferior appendage to past triumphs, and often they were judged to be a period in which advancing years and declining powers left the conductor without the authority and control that he exerted during his preceding decade with the New York Philharmonic. Such specious views resulted mainly from a lack of access to transcriptions of the NBC Symphony Orchestra broadcasts made by the network's engineers.