Product Description

When Alistair Cooke retired in March 2004 and then died a few weeks later, he was acclaimed by many as one of the greatest broadcasters of all time. His Letters from America, which began in 1946 and continued uninterrupted every week until early 2004, kept the world in touch with what was happening in Cooke's wry, liberal and humane style. This selection, made largely by Cooke himself and supplemented by his literary executor, gives us the very best of these legendary broadcasts. Over half have never appeared in print before. It is a remarkable portrait of a continent - and a man.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29444 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

From the Publisher
Many will have felt great sadness at hearing about the death of Alistair Cooke earlier this year. His long broadcasting career spans spanned the greater part of the 20th century and his weekly Letter From America gave generations a marvellous insight into our powerful ally.
BBC Audiobooks is proud to be publishing this box set that includes Alistair Cooke at the BBC, plus three volumes of Letter From America and the tribute programme that Radio 4 broadcast to commemorate Cooke’s eventful life as an English journalist reporting for most of his life from America.

About the Author
Alistair Cooke was born in Manchester in 1908 and educated at the universities of Cambridge, Yale and Harvard. Throughout his long career he worked as a journalist and broadcaster for many different organisations including the BBC, The Times and the Guardian, and won numerous awards for his work. He is best known both at home and abroad for his weekly Letters from America, far and away the longest-running radio series in broadcasting history. He died in March 2004, just a few weeks after his retirement.

Customer Reviews

A Love Letter to America
When I left England to live in the United States for one year last August, there was only one book I took with me - Alistair Cooke's 'Letter From America'. What else could I have taken? Cooke saw into America like no other Brit (or no other non-American, for that matter).

Starting at the mid 1940s, the book winds its way through post-war America nearly right up until the authors death in 2004, picking out the best of his weekly broadcasts. The subject matters range from politics, history, current affairs, entertainment and topics from the New England fall, jazz, Robert Kennedy's assassination (which he witnessed first-hand) and the O.J Simpson trial.

But it is not the subject matter that makes this book so special (for we already know about most of them anyway) it is none other than Cooke's insight and writing style. The articles flow like the finest novel or poem (which is probably attributed to Cooke's background in theatre). Each time you come back to read the book again it feels as though you are receiving the opinions of a familiar friend, and not some distant journalist.

There are drawbacks. Cooke was often criticised, and quite rightly so, for ignoring the darker side of the American dream. The other possible drawback, depending on your viewpoint, is that Cooke was a committed conservative, particularly in the latter half of his career. Many of the final articles from the late 90's and early 00's lament the current position of America and (what he saw as) the sliding standards of journalism. Maybe, but you also can't help feel that by this point he was slightly out of touch.

These minor quibbles, however, cannot undermine Cooke's overall achievement of helping us better understand this important nation, which could more accurately be described as love letters to America.

A good buy - but with a caveat!
Ah! That voice! Alistair Cooke had the voice that could be listened to for hours on end i.e. a sort-of cool, mellow, slow-burning voice. In fact he was one of the few people I've ever heard who could spend 15 minutes telling you almost nothing - and yet make it sound interesting!

The collection includes letters broadcast from the late 40s right through to the last few he wrote... but there's a caveat: and that is, that a lot of the letters are not the ORIGINAL recordings, but they were re-recorded (by Cooke himself of course) I would guess sometime during the late 80s/early 90s.

The collection loses one star for this... shame on you BBC! I know the original recordings still exist as a fair few of these letters were broadcast just after his death earlier this year in the BBC's "Letter From America - A Celebration" series, so why the original recordings weren't used I don't know. The sound quality was considered too poor I suppose. To me this does detract from the enjoyment as I would have liked to have heard again how his voice sounded all those years ago (I remember several of the 1960s letters that are featured very well).

But don't let this put you off buying the set, it's still a very good "listen" and it IS the voice of the man himself!

The collection also contains a bonus: Alistair Cooke at the BBC. I haven't listened to this yet, but it's contents look promising.

Recommended.

Read this and you'll be wanting more..
I have been listening to Alastair Cooke's broadcasts for many years, always finding something rewarding in them: a reference to an age before I was born, a different view point about an issue or something everyone else appeared to have missed. Cooke brought the ordinary into the major world events, showed the human side to many a major story and gave others the chance to see a perspective only obtainable through many years of hard work and intelligent inquiry. This book only contains a tiny number of the vast quantities of Letters from America but they are worthwhile letters; reading these samples of nearly sixty years of broadcasting provides a special insight into many issues, historical events and people largely forgotten or interpreted differently by a modern audience. Much of the most interesting content of the book is simply that of an old man explaining how the world changed in his lifetime: Cooke tells of the constants that he believed would last forever that new generations have never even heard of. It's worth reading for that warning alone. Regardless of the fading of the world Cooke knew his letters are both timeless reflections on people's nature and historically important records of a not so distant past. Some of the letters are included in the BBC audio CD collection but most are not so even if you have those recordings this book is still a worthwhile read. It's a different kind of America to that seen on the TV and movie theatre screens.