Alistair Cooke (1908–2004)

Superb read. A man with a true grasp of the massive history of America and its development. His perspective of historical events come with an excellent slant and he has managed to note the many hidden aspects of American history that you would rarely find in such detail in a single place. One of the best non-fiction novels I have read.

My last two years of high school were spent in a small boarding school in northern Israel. It was an English school, based on the British education system, and most students (not that there were too many of them; the entire school numbered 30 or so students) were British. They missed home and expressed their longings in various, odd ways, such as eating Marmite. When Saturday evening came around, they all gathered around the radio and listened to the BBC World Service, to find out how their show more soccer teams fared in the weekly League matches. That’s how I became aware of the BBC World Service, starting to listen to it myself before going to bed every evening.
The programme I remember most vividly from those long-gone days was the weekly reading of a “letter” by a British man with a voice that was deep and authoritative yet at the same time soothing and reassuring. Every week he would talk for 15 minutes, offering a snapshot of some aspect of life in America. The topics would cover all walks of life: domestic politics, foreign affairs, sports, show business, race relations, etc. Not having been in America yet, his weekly transmission opened for me a window into a world that was new and fascinating.
The man was Alistair Cooke and the name of the show was “Letter from America”. Cooke was a British journalist who moved to the United States in 1937, at the age of 29, and made America his home. The first episode of the show was broadcast by Cooke in March 1946, and the last on February 2004, a month before he passed away at the age of 95. For almost 60 years, Cooke was the voice through which listeners of the BBC learnt about the New World.
When I saw this book on sale I knew I would love it. I read it slowly, very slowly. I think it took me more than a year to finish it. I didn’t want to rush through the “letters”, wishing to draw out the pleasure for as long as possible. The move from the radio to the written word has not diminished Cooke’s presence; at times, I felt as if his voice spoke from the book’s pages. Even when the subject at hand is familiar, Cooke’s writing/reading provide details and perspective that weave together an insightful and mostly loving portrait of America.
This is a book to own and to return to from time to time, picking a “letter” that grabs our mood and rediscovering a piece of history, masterfully told by Alistair Cooke. show less

Alistair Cooke writes in the preface to this collection of 23 biographical sketches, "Most of these pieces tend to find, and rejoice in, what is best about their subjects." That is not to say that the distinguished British print and broadcast journalist (resident for many years in America) is starry-eyed about the men and women he profiles: George Bernard Shaw was a crank; Frank Lloyd Wright a prima donna; General George Marshall an appalling public speaker. Yet Cooke's smooth prose and keen show more insights explore the larger issues his subjects' stories raise and invite readers to appreciate the people who have made a difference. Franklin Roosevelt's visionary leadership was possible because of a gentleman's agreement with the press inconceivable today: they never printed a single photo of him in his wheelchair. FDR's vice president, John Nance Garner, was a Southern politician who understood only power and back-scratching: "There is one man left who is like him," Cooke wrote in 1967, "Lyndon Johnson"--cogently and simultaneously nailing LBJ's strength and weakness. Politicians and statesmen preponderate here (Cooke's Winston Churchill portrait is justly famous), but the author covers writers (P.G. Wodehouse, Robert Frost), performers (Gary Cooper, Duke Ellington), and columnists (James Reston, Erma Bombeck) with equal shrewdness. --Wendy Smith.

Deploring the current fashion for psycho-biographies, not to mention porno-biographies, of the famous, Alistair Cooke offers celebrations of people he has met during his sixty years of journalism, people he calls the Great or the Good, people who, he believes, have left the world a better or more interesting place. show less

William Safire, William F. Buckley, and Alistair Cooke are some of the first writers I go to when I want to be impressed and provoked by masterful English language use. Biography is one of my favorite genres. This book is a convenient combination of my favorites in that it gives me thumbnail biographies of six well-known figures presented in remarkable depth for such a compact presentation.

“A Note on Fame and Friendship” is a necessary preface to the work in that it addresses criticisms show more of the following individual vignettes that a reader may propose. Charles Chaplin is presented in an almost schizophrenic, complete dual personality, model. But Cooke clarifies that to some extent this image was deliberately crafted by Chaplin for sanity preservation. The Edward the VIII section is scant as far as personal interaction between Cooke and the former King, but Cooke admits that while there might not have been a lot of interaction between writer and subject, the story is so important that to fail to remark on it would be inappropriate (for him—Cooke was English, after all). Sections on the two intellectuals (Russell and Mencken), a movie star (Bogart), and a politician (Stevenson) all offer personal observations that add to a general reader’s perception of the humanity of popular heroes. show less