Product Description

Alistair Cooke offers a gallery of portraits and sketches of many of the people he has known, admired, or covered during his career. He provides stimulating and candid protraits of some of the most important people of the past and present.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #474617 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"The great and the good" is a happy phrase that takes in a general appreciation of some people who are great at one thing and other people whose character is the fascinating thing about them. Few would argue with the assertion that the author of this volume about men and women of great distinction is himself worthy of such categorisation. Alistair Cooke's extraordinarily long journalistic career (including broadcasting his Letter from America to BBC Radio 4 listeners for more than half a century) leaves him needing little introduction, on either side of the Atlantic or, indeed, the English Channel (a correspondent for Le Monde in France described him as "the best journalist in the world").

During his life Cooke has encountered many luminaries of the 20th century and this volume comprises 23 brief portraits, taking in, among others, writers, statesmen, generals, scientists, musicians and sportsmen, who have made the strongest impressions on him. His style will be familiar to many; succinct, engaging and deeply perceptive, it is never less than a pleasure to read. The warm respect he feels for his subjects shines throughout all; as he makes clear, he does not adhere to the belief "that the business of literary and historical criticism is the cutting down to size of the famous", and the dignity of his subjects is enshrined in each vignette. The collection though, is not intended merely as a series of eulogies, nor in any sense as a definitive list of the greatest figures of the 20th century. They are, rather, very human renderings, capturing from unexpected angles a group of unconnected yet exceptional characters, as Cooke experienced them, whose stories can teach us much about both human nature and the nature of the past century. --Alisdair Bowles

Review
A nostalgic reflection at the age of 90 upon a charmed life by one of the world's outstanding broadcasters. Born in England, Alastair Cooke became an American citizen and has lived in the USA since 1937. His much-loved Letters from America, now transmitted to 52 countries, are the longest-running one-man series in the history of broadcasting. The unmistakeably dry humour, the consciously modulated voice, the down to earth candour and the sensitivity to human nature, all of which mark his inimitable style, are reassuringly here in this selection of broadcast reminisciences of his friends and acquaintances who include politicians like George Wallace and Barry Goldwater, jazzman Duke Ellington, golfer Bobby Jones, round the world yachtsman Francis Chichester, actor Gary Cooper and poet Robert Frost. A true 'golden oldie', (both the book and the man). (Kirkus UK)

From the Publisher
-MEDIA REVIEWS:
‘ Alistair Cooke must be one of the century’s best known, most admired and loved English-language journalists and broadcasters and this collection of pieces…proces a showcase for his qualities as a writer and observer.’ FINANCIAL TIMES

‘ …Written with a sprightly wit, and the kind of relaxed air which – in writing at least – it takes a great deal of hard work to achieve’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

‘ Cook is a brilliant stylist, both in his broadcasting and writing…’ THE SPECTATOR

‘ Cooke’s polished appraisals are rich in the unexpected…’ THE INDEPENDENT

‘ …The informal, anecdotal style that makes Cooke so entertaining is much in evidence in this enjoyable collection of 24 profiles of people he has encountered in his journalistic career.’ SUNDAY TIMES

‘ Extended, reminiscent footnotes, which are the Cooke-ian forte, more pertinent than grand commentary…Ace’ THE GUARDIAN

Customer Reviews

A Partial Review
"Memories of the Great and the Good" is a collection of essays that, as much as introducing the more casual and less public sides of nearly two dozen luminaries, reveals the evolution of America and of Alistair Cooke. The pieces stretch from 1951 through 1999 and the most useful advice, repeated both in discussing Churchill's love of war and hatred of the idea of women's suffrage, and in dismissing the alleged racism of golfer Bobby Jones, is to beware the "shame of seeing a man out of his time." One reporter recently dubbed Cooke the Dorian Gray of journalism, perhaps both for having been silver-haired and apparently the same age for as many decades as not, and because it is difficult to tell to what time the man himself belongs.

Even though he is my grandfather, I can be no help on that score; in recent years I have seen the replacement of a knee and an angioplasty (both of which he has mentioned in his weekly BBC "Letter from America") leave him as sprightly as I have ever known him.

Each essay reflects the time of its creation, whether that was 1967 or 1999. The 1974 piece on Duke Ellington mentions a visit to the bandleader's flat "on the swagger side of Harlem," and comments, "There is such a place," the Duke being at the top of "the hierarchy of Negro social status." Yet the 1999 piece on FDR is most memorable for an account of the unexpected, unseen, and contemporarily unpublishable view of the president being carried out of a car and limping, assisted, into a giant hall. By urging the reader to look at his subjects in their times, he sometimes implicitly admonishes himself for failing to do so. "Wodehouse at Eighty," for one, shows the father of Jeeves unquestionably out of his time, an anachronism as viewed--and, to be honest, caricatured--by Cooke, in his early fifties at the time. In other essays he steps almost too much into the times and shoes of his subjects, for example when mirroring the outlook of Erma Bombeck, whose career "was that of her generation--brace yourselves!--mother and housewife." While many of the pieces attempt and succeed at portraying the individuals 'in their time,' a large number of the pieces were written far after 'their times' as obituaries, which should not be surprising as Cooke shares with every nonogenarian the fact of having seen an extraordinary number of players both step onto the stage and then take their bows and make their exits some time later.

Combined with this historical span, what is truly worthy about this book is that, like his earlier "Six Men," it displays the extraordinary degree of access which he, as a foreign correspondent par excellence, enjoyed with a dizzying array of figures. George Bernard Shaw is in a behind-the-scenes committee discussing the pronunciation of proper "BBC English." "The General"--Eisenhower-- sits on his back porch, commenting on his golf and waiting for Cooke's t.v. crew to reposition themselves. And Duke Ellington is in his boxers and a towel, devouring breakfast at two p.m. These are the kind of stories that I've heard come out over drinks in his study, or on Christmas afternoon in Vermont, as if they were the most pedestrian, ordinary experiences ...

"Memories of the Great and the Good" offers a rare look, at Cooke (long an icon of Britain to Americans and in icon of America to Britain) and at many of the most important actors on the stage of the twentieth century. I truly hope you will enjoy it.

The pleasure of their company...and of his

I read this book when it was first published almost a decade ago and recently re-read it after watching a television program about Alistair Cooke (November 20, 1908-March 30, 2004) that renewed my interest in his life and especially in those who attracted his interest as a journalist. My first encounter with Cooke occurred when my family and I watched "Omnibus," an educational television series, broadcast on Sunday afternoons from 1952 until 1961. Cooke served as host. He also attracted a great deal of favorable attention as the author of the "American Letter" program that was broadcast 58 years (from 1946 until 2004), re-named "Letter From America" after four years and eventually broadcast throughout the world by the BBC World Service.

What we have in Memories of the Great & the Good are Cooke's personal profiles of 23 prominent persons who, for various reasons, attracted his attention. Although Cooke proudly identified himself as a journalist, I think he would not object if I prefer to characterize him as a cultural anthropologist because he had an almost insatiable curiosity about all areas of human endeavor. Consider the diversity of those whom he discusses in this book. They include George Bernard Shaw, Frank Lloyd Wright, both Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ross, Gary Cooper, Duke Ellington, Erma Bombeck, and Robert ("Bobby") Jones. He frequently expressed his appreciation for having "the privilege of roaming at will around every region" of the United States and in each dimension of its culture. He welcomed the "chance of acquiring what Theodore Roosevelt called `the sense of the continent'... It is the opportunity to meet all sorts and classes of humanity in their native habitat...soldiers and sailors of every rank, small businessmen of great imagination and comicality, a minor gangster forging U.S. graded beef, a burlesque stripper, a Texas sheep slicer, a modest, illiterate boy from the Carolinas with a genius for leadership in deadly situations in the Second World War."

Fortunately, he shared his impressions and opinions with those who watched his various television programs, listened to his radio broadcasts, and/or read his newspaper and magazine articles as well as more than a dozen bestselling books. Whatever the given medium, Cooke was ever alert to significant details when encountering just about anyone and a master of figurative language when sharing those details with his reader, viewer or listener. Here are four brief excerpts that suggest the thrust and flavor of Cooke's unique style.

In his suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York, Frank Lloyd Wright "lay stretched out on a sofa, his fine hands folded on his lap, a shawl precisely draped around his shoulders. He looked like Merlin posing as Whistler's Mother. Indeed, there was always s curiously feminine grace about him, but it was nothing frail or skittish. He looked more like a matriarch of a pioneering family, one of those massive western gentlewomen who shipped the piano from Boston around the Horn, settled in the Sacramento Valley, defied the Argonauts as they set fire to the cattle barns, and, having finally reclaimed their Spanish land grants, came into their own again as the proud upholders of old manners against the derision and ribaldry of the new rich." (Page 32 from "Frank Lloyd Wright" that first appeared in the Manchester Guardian and was then reprinted in Cooke's book America Observed, published in 1989)

"Gary Cooper filled an empty niche in the world pantheon of essential gods. If no cowboy was ever like him, so much the worse for the cattle kingdom...He represented every man's best secret image of himself: the honorable man slicing clean through the broiling world of morals and machines. He isolated and enlarged to six feet three an untainted strain of goodness in a very male specimen of the male of the species." (Page 130 from "The Legend of Gary Cooper" that also first appeared in the Manchester Guardian and was then reprinted in Cooke's book America Observed, published in 1989)

"You leave [Ronald Reagan's presence] having gained an impression of an engaging kind of energy. He is precise and thoughtful on finance and the mechanics of welfare, quietly dogmatic about the social ferment. He talks no jargon, which is a rare relief. He chants few slogans, he does not preach or intone. He sounds like a decent, deadly serious, baffled middle-class professional man. This, as an executive geared for social rebellion and reform, may be his weakness. But it is his strength among the voters that, in a country with a huge middle class, he so faithfully reflects their bewilderment at the collapse of the old, middle-class standards, protections, and perhaps, shibboleths." (Pages 173-174 from "Reagan: The Common Man Writ Large" that first appeared in the Manchester Guardian in 1967)

Following the death of Robert ("Bobby") Tyre Jones Jr. after 22 years of increasingly more painful suffering from syringomyelia, a chronic progressive generative disease of the spiral cord, Cooke observes: "What we are left with in the end is a forever young, good-looking southerner with a private ironical view of life who, to the great good fortune of people who saw him, happened to play the great game with more magic and more grace than anyone before or since."(Page 277 from "The Gentleman from George" that first appeared in 1996 and was revised for this volume)

These and hundreds of other passages (I view them as precious "nuggets of insight") can be found throughout Cooke's profiles of "the great & and the good" with whom he had direct and usually frequent contact. How fortunate we are to share the pleasure of their company...and his. He lived more than 95 years and finally retired only a few weeks before his death. Nonetheless, he suggests in "To the Reader" that, had he "but life enough and time, he could probably "fill another book with a Dickensian-size cast of memorable unknowns of the greatest variety." Those of us who so greatly admire his work regret that no such book was written. However, we find consolation in the fact that there are so many other volumes - as well as CDs and DVDs -- to which we can return for delight as well as enlightenment.