Cooke Alistair Nauaghtie James Introduction (1 results)

Hard Back. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good (Slipcase). First Folio Edition. 295 Pages Indexed. Published by Allen Lane in 2004, published in Penguin Books in 2005, and reissued in 2007. This special 2009 Folio Edition, beautiful in its slipcase, follows the text of the 2007 Penguin Books paperback edition. Gray boards consisting of wrap-around pictorial of the skyline of Battery Park and the Manhattan skyline. Frontispiece is Alistair Cooke broadcasting for the BBC in 1946. The endpapers are gray. There are 16 Illustrations between pages 92 and 93 and there are 16 Illustrations between pages 236 and 237 and there is a list on pages VII and VIII. The Contents are in Seven Parts (decades) ranging from 1940s thru 2004. No journalist in the twentieth century did more to explain America to the British than Alistair Cooke. He knew the United States when it still echoed to the sounds of the jazz age, then in the depression, watched it through the cataclysms of the sixties and was still telling his story after the earth cracked in New York at the start of another century on 11 September. His brilliance lay somewhere in the gleam of his roving eye, which was attracted to the great characters and the big events, but also picked up the hypnotic rhythms of the day-to-day. As a result, he was both an enthusiastic witness to history and a poet of the ordinary. His Letters from America are precious documents because they make up a picture that was absorbed by two generations, and fit together in the kind of rich mosaic that an ambitious novelist might want to create, each piece casting light on the others and nothing seeming out of place. Read him in the forties and then in the nineties, and he is the same man - acknowledging how much there is still to learn and how the observer can be confounded by the course of events, but nonetheless having the confidence to trust his own sharp lens and what it shows him. From beginning to end he speaks about what he sees in the same voice. He first took to the American roads in the early thirties, when he was a student on a Commonwealth Fellowship at Yale. And so, after twists and turns and some subtle bargaining at the BBC where he'd got work as a film critic, there came the first weekly letter, broadcast on the Home Service in 1946. Fifty-eight years later he was still using it as the fulcrum of his week. It is impossible to read these letters without wishing to raise a toast to Cooke. Imagine what we would have missed if he had never written a letter. Alistair Cooke was well known in the United States as the host of PBS Masterpiece Theater from 1971 to 1992.