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Letters from America, 1946–1951
“[Cooke is] one of the most gifted and urbane essayists of the century, a supreme master.” —The Spectator
As the voice of the BBC’s Letter from America for close to six decades, Alistair Cooke addressed several millions of listeners on five continents. They tuned in every Friday evening or Sunday morning to listen to his erudite and entertaining reports on life in the United States. According to Lord Hill of Luton, chairman of the BBC, Cooke had “a virtuosity approaching genius in talking about America in human terms.”
Letters from America: 1946–1951 contains highlights from the first five years of Alistair Cooke’s legendary BBC radio program, years when listeners were eager to put the horrors of World War II behind them.
Cooke’s lively and illuminating dispatches from New York perfectly capture the spirit of the times. From the significance of Labor Day to reflections on the changing seasons to the heroic Long Island duck that saved two people from drowning, little escapes the broadcaster’s sharp reportorial eye and affable wit. This collection includes Cooke’s historical tour of Washington, DC, and his thoughts on why New York is such a singular city, and covers more serious topics such as the Soviet threat and the anxieties of the atomic age. Always captivating, Cooke treats the reader to profiles of Joe Louis and Will Rogers and reflections on Damon Runyon’s America, and concludes with a “Letter to an Intending Immigrant.”
Letters from America: 1946–1951, the first volume of Cooke’s iconic broadcasts, offers a captivating journey through culture, history, and politics and is a classic of twentieth-century journalism.
As the voice of the BBC’s Letter from America for close to six decades, Alistair Cooke addressed several millions of listeners on five continents. They tuned in every Friday evening or Sunday morning to listen to his erudite and entertaining reports on life in the United States. According to Lord Hill of Luton, chairman of the BBC, Cooke had “a virtuosity approaching genius in talking about America in human terms.”
Letters from America: 1946–1951 contains highlights from the first five years of Alistair Cooke’s legendary BBC radio program, years when listeners were eager to put the horrors of World War II behind them.
Cooke’s lively and illuminating dispatches from New York perfectly capture the spirit of the times. From the significance of Labor Day to reflections on the changing seasons to the heroic Long Island duck that saved two people from drowning, little escapes the broadcaster’s sharp reportorial eye and affable wit. This collection includes Cooke’s historical tour of Washington, DC, and his thoughts on why New York is such a singular city, and covers more serious topics such as the Soviet threat and the anxieties of the atomic age. Always captivating, Cooke treats the reader to profiles of Joe Louis and Will Rogers and reflections on Damon Runyon’s America, and concludes with a “Letter to an Intending Immigrant.”
Letters from America: 1946–1951, the first volume of Cooke’s iconic broadcasts, offers a captivating journey through culture, history, and politics and is a classic of twentieth-century journalism.
236 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 28, 1981
About the author
Alistair Cooke
106 books41 followersBooks of British-American journalist and broadcaster Alfred Alistair Cooke include
Around the World in 50 Years
(1966) and
Alistair Cooke's America
(1973).
After the University of Cambridge graduated him, the British Broadcasting Corporation hired him. This legendary television host rose to prominence for his reports on London Letter on radio of National Broadcasting Corporation during the 1930s. Cooke immigrated to the United States in 1937. In 1946, he began his radio appearances on Letter from America on the British Broadcasting Corporation; this tradition that lasted nearly six decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alistai...
After the University of Cambridge graduated him, the British Broadcasting Corporation hired him. This legendary television host rose to prominence for his reports on London Letter on radio of National Broadcasting Corporation during the 1930s. Cooke immigrated to the United States in 1937. In 1946, he began his radio appearances on Letter from America on the British Broadcasting Corporation; this tradition that lasted nearly six decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alistai...
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 1, 2012
I first heard Alistair Cooke's radio broadcasts very late in life, on the BBC over short-wave radio while working on an organic goat farm in the Netherlands. Late at night there was not much to do except watch football, smoke and drink whiskey - none of which were really of much interest. But Alistair Cooke's Letter from America was something different. Cooke, originally from Manchester, England broadcast his insightful, biting and human, funny and solemn cultural feature from America on the BBC for 58 years until his death in 2004. His style is reminiscent of Garrison Keillor and other great radio story-tellers in that he starts of at some seemingly harmless and unimportant news headline and takes you through a journey of association to bring you back around again to your starting point very much the richer for the journey through culture, history, politics, sociology and anything else that might have caught his fancy along the way. More importantly, even if you were unaware of the point, you always got there in the end with eyes more wide open and your heart just a little more in your throat than 15 minutes before. His voice was such that one could turn off the lights and pretend they were listening to old time radio with our parents in front of the big radio console as the Lone Ranger or the Green Hornet or Nero Wolfe saved the day.
Following his death, Penguin published a rich selection of his broadcasts in written form. Some of the highlights include his insights on Joe Louis, friendship with Charlie Chaplin, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and Fall in New England.
Following his death, Penguin published a rich selection of his broadcasts in written form. Some of the highlights include his insights on Joe Louis, friendship with Charlie Chaplin, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and Fall in New England.
December 20, 2022
In the absence of a book of non-fiction that I keep close by when I want a rest from a novel, I found this second hand copy of Alistair Cooke's Letters from America 1946-1951 bought from a charity shop a few years ago. It had been languishing at the back of my book case ever since. It was bought because I knew that my mother was an avid listener to his radio programme after the war. Everything stopped for those fifteen minutes, she never missed an episode. My copy was published in 1951 and reprinted in 1984, so is thirty eight years old. The pages are falling out. So here I am, trying to elicit the dulcet tones of his trans-Atlantic dialect. These are some notes from my favourite pieces:
GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL
At the end of summer, they are packing up the cottage at the end of Long Island. It's Labor Day and bringing in the "rusty barbeque grill we haven't used in years".
MY FIRST INDIAN
Here he travels to Santa Fe in the footsteps of D H Laurence who wrote books about the Indian view of life. "I took the Santa Fe train from Los Angeles and discovered, as everybody does, that it doesn't stop at Santa Fe". Going on the Albuquerque and taking the bus.
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH AMERICA
"An American senator, speaking from those cavernous lungs which the Almighty saved for American senators" Speaking at a conference, the author's piece was on "the comparative significance of cricket and baseball". On the latter, the crowd expects a frequent show of indignation .... it's a good show while it lasts and is included in the price of admission". Compared to "the Englishman's strict fidelity to the umpire's little finger".
LONG ISLAND DUCK
All about Long Island, not just the duck. "The geography of Long Island is very easy to describe. It is a flat fish lying north-east of New York City, parallel with the Connecticut shore. It's nose burrows into Manhattan and it's tail is a hundred miles out to sea. , divided into two forks, or flukes".
"Near Riverhead is a big duck farm.....a small snowscape that turns into several thousand ducks".
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
When J B Priestly visits New York, his subsequent controversial review was picked up by he New York times and created a stir. Cooke had resided in the USA for 15 years when he wrote this piece which is about travellers writing their first observations on a new location.
WINTER AND FLORIDA
Writing about New England and "our regular blight - a winter keen and cold that blasts the land and withers it ....... winter is a thing to be endured ....... come November and again in February and March, the wish that we were somewhere else". That is the escape to Florida. Later we are told about "a jook party or tonk", words I had never heard before.
SPRING - THE NINTH OF APRIL
A sensitive piece about the American civil war, and particularly a glowing portrait of the defeated Robert E Lee. A stunning biography in only three pages. Unbelievably, this head of the Confederate army was first offered by Lincoln the leadership of the Northern Union army. "One of the great ironies of military history".
AMERICAN SUMMER
"Of the four American seasons none is more dramatic or more humbling than the summer. It is a time when heat-waves roam around the continent, moody as bandits, and close in on unsuspecting places, on southern swamps and midland prairies and northern valleys, with thunder out of the Apocalypse and a one night respite of cool after rain". Maybe except for Maine, the Pacific coast and Western Oregon and "the price they pay is the English one. cloudy skies and gentle showers. . but everywhere else summer is a blinding ordeal".
(Later: "you might think that everybody who speaks a form of English knows what a nettle is? ......No!" The author also goes on to explain about a corn dance. But what is corn?
"At this time of year about twenty-odd million Americans are living in some other place than home: in summer camps, by lakes etc etc".
THE FALL OF NEW ENGLAND
Here Alistair Cooke is "marvelling" at "the English spring and New England in the fall". He explains about the phenomime that is the weather with, for example, Arkansas with its "blazing hawthorns" whereas ours "the leaves stay green until the first frost kills them". The evocation of the American countryside is conjured up with sentences like "I drove up and over the hills across New York State into Connecticut..... and the maple with it's bursting sugar which blazes into scarlet". And then on, into Vermont.
MOVING A HOME
The author talks about his old apartment in New York in a community bound by 72nd Street and 68th Street on Lexington Avenue. Here his run down and seedy apartment has a long corridor with the dining room at the far end, "so far away that we used to say let's go to 70th Street and eat". They are moving to another village bounded by Fifth and Madison Avenue. Going up in the world. He talks about the typical open plan American apartment: the door allergy and steam heating. Talking about New York: "This great, plunging, dramatic, ferocious, swift and terrible big city is the most folksy and provincial place I have ever lived in".
MARGARET AND MISSOURI
This is about Margaret Truman, the President's daughter, a mid-western girl hitting Washington society! With the observation "Snobbery is a whole time job over here, and is therefore more conspicuous and more pathetic than it is with the same people in Britain".
NO SYMPATHY FOR APATHY
More about the New York summer, the same latitude as Madrid: "the summer comes in with a crash of thunder , and thereafter the heat broods over the city until it has turned rancid".
"Perhaps New York and other American cities are no place for sensitive souls" ..... "steam pipes under motor parkways so the snow melts as it falls".
IT'S A DEMOCRACY, ISNT IT?
About other people's noise and music. "In Britain, one of the minor duties of good citizenship is not to disturb the private life of other citizens. In this country, it's the other way round"........."the ability not to hear what you don't want to hear, or selective deafness"......."one aspect of the American character, the ability to withstand a great deal of outside interference".
LETTER TO AN INTENDING IMMIGRANT
"Today you can cross the three thousand miles of the American continent and never want for a private bathroom, a cement highway, a night baseball game, an airplane connection, a pair of nylon stockings or a gallon of ice cream in six different flavours".
GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL
At the end of summer, they are packing up the cottage at the end of Long Island. It's Labor Day and bringing in the "rusty barbeque grill we haven't used in years".
MY FIRST INDIAN
Here he travels to Santa Fe in the footsteps of D H Laurence who wrote books about the Indian view of life. "I took the Santa Fe train from Los Angeles and discovered, as everybody does, that it doesn't stop at Santa Fe". Going on the Albuquerque and taking the bus.
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH AMERICA
"An American senator, speaking from those cavernous lungs which the Almighty saved for American senators" Speaking at a conference, the author's piece was on "the comparative significance of cricket and baseball". On the latter, the crowd expects a frequent show of indignation .... it's a good show while it lasts and is included in the price of admission". Compared to "the Englishman's strict fidelity to the umpire's little finger".
LONG ISLAND DUCK
All about Long Island, not just the duck. "The geography of Long Island is very easy to describe. It is a flat fish lying north-east of New York City, parallel with the Connecticut shore. It's nose burrows into Manhattan and it's tail is a hundred miles out to sea. , divided into two forks, or flukes".
"Near Riverhead is a big duck farm.....a small snowscape that turns into several thousand ducks".
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
When J B Priestly visits New York, his subsequent controversial review was picked up by he New York times and created a stir. Cooke had resided in the USA for 15 years when he wrote this piece which is about travellers writing their first observations on a new location.
WINTER AND FLORIDA
Writing about New England and "our regular blight - a winter keen and cold that blasts the land and withers it ....... winter is a thing to be endured ....... come November and again in February and March, the wish that we were somewhere else". That is the escape to Florida. Later we are told about "a jook party or tonk", words I had never heard before.
SPRING - THE NINTH OF APRIL
A sensitive piece about the American civil war, and particularly a glowing portrait of the defeated Robert E Lee. A stunning biography in only three pages. Unbelievably, this head of the Confederate army was first offered by Lincoln the leadership of the Northern Union army. "One of the great ironies of military history".
AMERICAN SUMMER
"Of the four American seasons none is more dramatic or more humbling than the summer. It is a time when heat-waves roam around the continent, moody as bandits, and close in on unsuspecting places, on southern swamps and midland prairies and northern valleys, with thunder out of the Apocalypse and a one night respite of cool after rain". Maybe except for Maine, the Pacific coast and Western Oregon and "the price they pay is the English one. cloudy skies and gentle showers. . but everywhere else summer is a blinding ordeal".
(Later: "you might think that everybody who speaks a form of English knows what a nettle is? ......No!" The author also goes on to explain about a corn dance. But what is corn?
"At this time of year about twenty-odd million Americans are living in some other place than home: in summer camps, by lakes etc etc".
THE FALL OF NEW ENGLAND
Here Alistair Cooke is "marvelling" at "the English spring and New England in the fall". He explains about the phenomime that is the weather with, for example, Arkansas with its "blazing hawthorns" whereas ours "the leaves stay green until the first frost kills them". The evocation of the American countryside is conjured up with sentences like "I drove up and over the hills across New York State into Connecticut..... and the maple with it's bursting sugar which blazes into scarlet". And then on, into Vermont.
MOVING A HOME
The author talks about his old apartment in New York in a community bound by 72nd Street and 68th Street on Lexington Avenue. Here his run down and seedy apartment has a long corridor with the dining room at the far end, "so far away that we used to say let's go to 70th Street and eat". They are moving to another village bounded by Fifth and Madison Avenue. Going up in the world. He talks about the typical open plan American apartment: the door allergy and steam heating. Talking about New York: "This great, plunging, dramatic, ferocious, swift and terrible big city is the most folksy and provincial place I have ever lived in".
MARGARET AND MISSOURI
This is about Margaret Truman, the President's daughter, a mid-western girl hitting Washington society! With the observation "Snobbery is a whole time job over here, and is therefore more conspicuous and more pathetic than it is with the same people in Britain".
NO SYMPATHY FOR APATHY
More about the New York summer, the same latitude as Madrid: "the summer comes in with a crash of thunder , and thereafter the heat broods over the city until it has turned rancid".
"Perhaps New York and other American cities are no place for sensitive souls" ..... "steam pipes under motor parkways so the snow melts as it falls".
IT'S A DEMOCRACY, ISNT IT?
About other people's noise and music. "In Britain, one of the minor duties of good citizenship is not to disturb the private life of other citizens. In this country, it's the other way round"........."the ability not to hear what you don't want to hear, or selective deafness"......."one aspect of the American character, the ability to withstand a great deal of outside interference".
LETTER TO AN INTENDING IMMIGRANT
"Today you can cross the three thousand miles of the American continent and never want for a private bathroom, a cement highway, a night baseball game, an airplane connection, a pair of nylon stockings or a gallon of ice cream in six different flavours".
April 12, 2020
It is years since I read this book, and I am pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed it so much. It has dated, of course, particularly regarding race relations, and, to a lesser extent, to women's lives: but it is a fascinating series of snapshots of an America which has changed so much, and yet still stays the same in so many ways.
The book was enhanced for me because I have visited many more of the places Cooke describes now, than when I first read it. It also brings back good memories of his unflappable voice on Radio 4, now sadly no more.
The book was enhanced for me because I have visited many more of the places Cooke describes now, than when I first read it. It also brings back good memories of his unflappable voice on Radio 4, now sadly no more.
December 19, 2017
A selection of the weekly broadcasts of masterly prose writing from the BBC's Washington Correspondent. They require some knowledge of contemporary events to best be understood today.
November 26, 2014
This book is a collection of the radio scripts that Alistair Cooke delivered during his very long career as a journalist. And that they are scripts are very clear you can nearly hear his voice (with what I assume is one of the low and smooth plummy accents of the well educated of his generation - although I have to admit I have never heard him. That's just what it 'sounded' like).
Some of the reports were less interesting for me, the descriptions of New England in the fall (autumn) were not my thing, But I did enjoy the descriptions of people (like Duke Ellington and Martin Luther King jr) who he had actually met and seemed to have a very good insight into thier actions.
What interested me the most was his description of major political events, in retrospect you can see how very perspicacious he was (he brings out the long words hidden inside me), his summary of the motivations involved in Vietnam, his questions around Reagan and the cold war, so very balanced. He was so very good at having an opinion without being opinionated. The part that struck me the most however is how he explained his own evolution of thoughts and views and treatment of black Americans over time. He reflected the views of the time and then reflected on those views at a later date. You can understand how he managed to be a sucessful journalist for so many years.
Some of the reports were less interesting for me, the descriptions of New England in the fall (autumn) were not my thing, But I did enjoy the descriptions of people (like Duke Ellington and Martin Luther King jr) who he had actually met and seemed to have a very good insight into thier actions.
What interested me the most was his description of major political events, in retrospect you can see how very perspicacious he was (he brings out the long words hidden inside me), his summary of the motivations involved in Vietnam, his questions around Reagan and the cold war, so very balanced. He was so very good at having an opinion without being opinionated. The part that struck me the most however is how he explained his own evolution of thoughts and views and treatment of black Americans over time. He reflected the views of the time and then reflected on those views at a later date. You can understand how he managed to be a sucessful journalist for so many years.
March 25, 2015
eARC: Netgalley
I thoroughly enjoyed this book! I know this will be one of those rare "keepers" that I return to read through the years. Thank you Netgalley and Open Road Media for introducing me to a new favorite!
I thoroughly enjoyed this book! I know this will be one of those rare "keepers" that I return to read through the years. Thank you Netgalley and Open Road Media for introducing me to a new favorite!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews