Alistair Cooke's America
Alistair Cooke, 1973
★ 4.10 from 505 ratings on Goodreads
A British-born reporter who spent fifty years explaining America to the BBC turns his notebooks into a personal history of the country. Cooke's reporterly voice moves briskly through anecdotes and scenes, mixing wit, nostalgia and a wondering sense of national identity.
Feels like nostalgia, wonder and humor. About memory, identity and power.
Who it’s for
You may enjoy it if you like history told by a witty outsider with a reporter's eye for scenes and people. Be aware that some readers find the book dated and selective, and its conclusions may not match yours.
Why read it
It offers a readable, anecdotal route into American history, useful if you want an outsider's long view of the country's self-image and conflicts.
A page from the book
What a lifetime of news looks like when it's recited in one breath.
During thirtyfive years as a foreign correspondent, I must have covered just about everything, from the public life of six Presidents to the private life of a burlesque stripper; from the black market in beef to the Black Panthers; from Estes Kefauver amid the snows of New Hampshire to Jack Nicklaus amid the azaleas of Augusta, Georgia; from Henry Kaiser’s Liberty ships to Francis Chichester’s Gypsy Moth sailing into Staten Island at one in the morning; from the Marshall Plan to Planned Parenthood; from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s last stand to the massacre of Muhammad Ali by Joe Frazier. What readers say
Readers find it an engaging, readable, often witty overview of American history, valuing its outsider perspective and photographs. Some call it dated, selective, or conventional, with conclusions they don’t always share.
Alistair Cooke.Cooke's BBC radio series Letter from America ran from 1946 to 2004 — 2,869 broadcasts, the longest-running speech programme in broadcasting history.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Alistair Cooke's America for me?
- You may enjoy it if you like history told by a witty outsider with a reporter's eye for scenes and people. Be aware that some readers find the book dated and selective, and its conclusions may not match yours.
- What is Alistair Cooke's America like?
- Cooke's reporterly voice moves briskly through anecdotes and scenes, mixing wit, nostalgia and a wondering sense of national identity. Feels like nostalgia, wonder and humor. About memory, identity and power.
- What should I read after Alistair Cooke's America?
- If you liked Alistair Cooke's America, try A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway), Travels with Charley (John Steinbeck) and The Greatest Generation (Tom Brokaw).
A taste of the feed
The cost of becoming conscious of your own gift.
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
A Moveable Feast · Ernest Hemingway
Every generation mistakes its childhood for a better world.
Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.
Travels with Charley · John Steinbeck
The cheerful logic of a country deciding its past never happened.
So let’s take that beautiful idea to its logical conclusion and not only leave the past behind but deny the past ever happened. Like this: America is not a land of immigrants. There. Was that so hard to say? It makes sense if you think about it. It feels like we’ve been here forever, doesn’t it? Let’s just assume we have been.
I Am America (And So Can You!) · Stephen Colbert
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