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eBook America Observed: The Newspaper years of Alistair Cooke ePub

by Alistair Cooke

Author: Alistair Cooke
Language: English
ISBN: 0394573420
ISBN13: 978-0394573427
Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (November 19, 1988)
Pages: 232
Category: Americas
Subcategory: History
Rating: 4.2
Votes: 218
Formats: doc mbr lit rtf
ePub file: 1341 kb
Fb2 file: 1862 kb

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After Alistair Cooke's death the Fulbright Alistair Cooke Award in. .Alistair Cooke's America (22 November 1973) BBC Books, London.

After Alistair Cooke's death the Fulbright Alistair Cooke Award in Journalism was established as a tribute to the man and his life and career achievements . ISBN 0-563-12182-3; (13 November 2003) Phoenix. Letters from America: The Americans, Letters from America and Talk About America.

America Observed: Newspaper Years of Alistair Cooke. I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of newspaper treats, and now am only left wondering why it sat on my bookshelf, unread, for two years before I finally got to it. And also where I can find more of Alistair Cooke. 0394573420 (ISBN13: 9780394573427).

America Observed" provides, for the first time, a collection of Alistair Cooke's memorable dispatches to "The Guardian" written between 1946 and 1972, the year that he retired as the paper's chief American correspondent. Ronald Wells has selected over 50 interpretative peices that span the great range of Cooke's reporting: politics, literature, sport, vignettes of regional life, long-gone Presidents from Truman to Nixon, the racial turmoil of the 1960s and profiles of Americans as various as Frank Lloyd Wright and Garry Cooper, Eleanor Roosevelt and Marilyn.

By the well-known newspaper and radio correspondent Alistair Cooke, this collection comprises 59 of Cooke's dispatches from America for The Manchester Guardian and The Guardian covering the period from 1946 to 1972. Penguin Books LTD. ISBN-10.

The book accompanying the television series Alistair Cooke’s America sold almost 2m copies

As Guardian journalist and BBC broadcaster, he never abandoned his principle of the objectivity of the reporter. The book accompanying the television series Alistair Cooke’s America sold almost 2m copies. And Cooke became a household name in the US as host of television’s Masterpiece Theatre.

Release Date:January 1989. Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd. Length:256 Pages.

Select Format: Hardcover. Release Date:January 1989. 41 lbs. Dimensions:7. 20th Century Americas Biographies Education & Reference History Social Science Social Sciences World. Recently Viewed and Featured. Alan Rawsthorne: Portrait of a Composer.

Alistair Cooke’s weekly talks on American life, history and politics from 1946 – 2004. Discover more programmes. The best of Radio 4: opinion pieces, history, international reporting, books and culture. Letter from America by theme. The best of Letter from America - from elections and presidents to movies and television. See Cooke’s original scripts for Letter from America. Listen to the programmes, and see the scripts at the Boston University Archive. Music, movies and television in America. Letter from America rediscovered. The story of how 650 taped home recordings were found and restored.

The son of a Wesleyan Methodist lay preacher, Cooke pursued literary and theatrical interests at Jesus College, Cambridge, and graduated summa.

Alistair Cooke delivered his last Letter from America after 58 years on Friday 20 February (repeated, as ever, on Saturday and Sunday) and, having unusually missed the following week through illness, retired only this month. Alistair Cooke delivered his last Letter from America after 58 years on Friday 20 February (repeated, as ever, on Saturday and Sunday) and, having unusually missed the following week through illness, retired only this month. It was the 2,869th of his series of radio despatches for the BBC. Download the new Indpendent Premium app.

Here there is just scenery, the odd map or illustration and - most importantly - Cooke himself talking directly an.

A classic from what now seems like the Golden Age of TV documentaries, Alistair Cooke’s America (America: A Personal History of the United States) was first broadcast in 1972-3 and it remains, along with the contemporary The World at War, an example of how documentaries should be made.

Offers more than fifty selections of the journalist's best work drawn from his twenty-six year career as chief correspondent to the British newspaper "The Manchester Guardian"

Tetaian

America Observed, Alistair Cooke

Alistair Cooke was born in Manchester in 1908 and educated at Cambridge, Yale, and Harvard. In 1940 he began working as a reporter for the London `Times' and then the `Manchester Guardian'. An author of books, he is best known for his radio broadcast "Letter from America", the longest-running radio series in broadcasting history. This 1988 book is a selection of his articles from the 1940s to the 1980s. This 234 page book does not have an `Index' to its 58 articles, originally daily dispatches from 1946 to 1972. The selection of articles was done by Ronald A. Wells, an academic historian at Calvin College.

The `Introduction' explains the importance or uniqueness of America. De Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s to tell Europe about a working democracy, the wave of the future that would replace aristocracy. Cooke met his first Americans when his family was required to house American troops in 1917 (no Third Amendment). Cooke attended Yale and Harvard to study dramatics and theater. He got a job as a film critic for the BBC, then as a reporter. Is the rise and fall of the American empire inevitable? Its called "imperial overstretch" (p.15), expansion beyond the ability to support it. MacArthur and Eisenhower warned against Vietnam. The national debt exploded, especially with Reagan (p.16).

If the average age of Americans is 39 then few will remember the events prior to 1972 which are described here. Cooke's article on J. Edgar Hoover may be typical of these articles. "Eight Presidents trusted and depended on him as a permanent fixture." Cooke can't explain it but Curt Gentry's biography does. Hoover got the dirt on Congressmen so he couldn't be eliminated. FDR promoted Hoover because he gathered information on his friends and enemies. It is very amusing and instructive to read Cooke's report on Truman's loss of the 1948 election! This article also tells of Truman's history of overcoming adversity all of his life. The article about Eisenhower's death wanders a lot. Was the peace and prosperity of his reign only an illusion? The involvement in Vietnam began. It was not "sheer luck" that promoted him, unless you believe Napoleon's advice on luck being very important to a General.

The article on Lyndon Johnson reminds us of his working class background (like Harry Truman). Johnson created a second New Deal in his reign. Cooke's description of a Goldwater rally speaks of the "now standard uniform for the young of all countries" but fails to describe it. Denim and a T-shirt? Goldwater's actions seem self-contradictory (p.154), or just another compromise? What caused the riot in 1965 Watts (one of the small towns of Los Angeles)? Watts had the lowest per capita income, the highest crime rate, and the highest unemployment. Cause or correlation? Great heat and high humidity are associated with civil disturbances. Watts' three-bedroom houses and little lawns would look like a dream city to the slum dwellers of Glasgow or Manchester.

Cooke's background in drama and literature shows in his description of a Billy Graham rally in Madison Square Garden. Does salvation depend on a religious revival? Would this prevent crime and juvenile delinquency? Does Public Opinion (manufactured by advertising) prevent a Christian life (p.73)? One article is about the death of Gary Cooper at age 60. An opinion poll noted the lack of confidence in the leaders and rulers of our society (p.210). [Do these figures reflect the economy?] Another article is on the scientific study of Masters and Johnson that created a scandal in 1968. Cooke describes the Democratic Convention in 1968 Chicago. Were there "Gestapo tactics"? Did this result in an election loss? [Was it an example of dirty tricks?]

Whitehammer

First let me say I have always had enormous respect for Alastair Cooke. For decades he was the voice of a favorite uncle who could be depended upon for detached yet sympathetic commentary about us Americans for a British audience, despite having become a US citizen and a resident here for most of his professional life. Nevertheless, this collection of many of his BBC "Letter From America" broadcasts and other writings seems rather musty, probably because the incidents reported are too recent to be history, but too remote to be of any contemporary interest. Who, flicking his iPhone, really cares about G. David Schine? There are some hilarious sports entries; one, a Soviet description of beizbol, has no need for a Cyrillic font, and another written entirely in Cricket; transparent to a Brit and pure Mesopotamian to anyone else. Probably the most interesting, and disastrous, is a piece written for the Manchester Guardian on the eve of the Dewey-Truman election, where Mr. Cooke, more in sorrow than in anger, assigns Harry Truman to the ashheap of history.
For those of us who lived through all this, the book is a trip down memory lane; for everyone else, it's a Fifties kitchen.