This book took me quite a while to read.

Interesting perspective one has now on things from not too long ago. Times are a changing quickly.

Overall I enjoyed reading his stories from America. I learned about the past, it was interesting to read an adult's take on the time of my childhood and see him change from an optimist to more of a pessimist during the 58 years this book spans. ( )

Am loving it, but the podcasts are better. His voice and diction add his personal subtle humour to the stories and allow the imagination to see what he saw. ( )

My last two years of high school were spent in a small boarding school in northern Israel. It was an English school, based on the British education system, and most students (not that there were too many of them; the entire school numbered 30 or so students) were British. They missed home and expressed their longings in various, odd ways, such as eating Marmite. When Saturday evening came around, they all gathered around the radio and listened to the BBC World Service, to find out how their soccer teams fared in the weekly League matches. That’s how I became aware of the BBC World Service, starting to listen to it myself before going to bed every evening.
The programme I remember most vividly from those long-gone days was the weekly reading of a “letter” by a British man with a voice that was deep and authoritative yet at the same time soothing and reassuring. Every week he would talk for 15 minutes, offering a snapshot of some aspect of life in America. The topics would cover all walks of life: domestic politics, foreign affairs, sports, show business, race relations, etc. Not having been in America yet, his weekly transmission opened for me a window into a world that was new and fascinating.
The man was Alistair Cooke and the name of the show was “Letter from America”. Cooke was a British journalist who moved to the United States in 1937, at the age of 29, and made America his home. The first episode of the show was broadcast by Cooke in March 1946, and the last on February 2004, a month before he passed away at the age of 95. For almost 60 years, Cooke was the voice through which listeners of the BBC learnt about the New World.
When I saw this book on sale I knew I would love it. I read it slowly, very slowly. I think it took me more than a year to finish it. I didn’t want to rush through the “letters”, wishing to draw out the pleasure for as long as possible. The move from the radio to the written word has not diminished Cooke’s presence; at times, I felt as if his voice spoke from the book’s pages. Even when the subject at hand is familiar, Cooke’s writing/reading provide details and perspective that weave together an insightful and mostly loving portrait of America.
This is a book to own and to return to from time to time, picking a “letter” that grabs our mood and rediscovering a piece of history, masterfully told by Alistair Cooke. ( )

Fantastic. This is a collection of Alistair Cooke's 'letters from America' - radio broadcasts for a British audience from the USA. He discusses culture, politics, family life, sport, music, but the subject matter (though fascinating) isn't what makes this book so good. Cooke is one of the most effortlessly smooth, fluent writers I've ever read. It's fascinating to follow one man through the decades and to see the subtle shifts in his vocabulary and writing style.

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1040674.html

Part of the Sunday morning routine of my childhood was to listen to the weekly ten or fifteen minute "Letter from America", one of the world's longest radio programmes, produced in a stunning 2.689 editions over 58 years before Cooke gave up in 2004, a few weeks before his death at the age of 96. By the time I started understanding the content of the talks, Cooke was already sixty and had been doing it for over half his life.

The BBC has a tribute section on its website, where you can read and hear all about it. The primary way to appreciate Cooke's pieces is of course by listening to them, but there is no harm in having this selection in the form of dead trees.

They don't all work as well on the printed page, but there are some that do - a brilliant lyrical description of the New England fall; a lovely account of a family Christmas; his eyewitness account of the assassination of Robert Kennedy. It is interesting that in his early pieces on race relations, he really didn't seem to get the nature of the problem; but he redeems himself partially with a reflection on the life of Duke Ellington, and then completely with his reminiscence of covering Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. There are three pieces included about the assassination of JFK; only one about Watergate, from years later; and several about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which from the perspective of only a very few years later seems excessive.

Anyway, it's a heavy book, probably better for dipping into than reading straight through as I did, but worth having by anyone who remembers him. ( )