American Home Front, The: 1941-1942

Cooke, Alistair

ISBN 10: 0709071000 ISBN 13: 9780709071006

Publisher: Brilliance Audio on CD Unabridged, 2006

Synopsis

A New York Times bestseller: This portrait of the United States at the beginning of World War II is "an unexpected and welcome discovery in a time capsule" (The Washington Post).

In nearly three thousand BBC broadcasts over fifty-eight years, Alistair Cooke reported on America, illuminating our country for a global audience. Shortly before he passed away, a long-forgotten manuscript resurfaced in a closet in his New York apartment. It was a travelogue of America during the early days of World War II that had sat there for sixty years.

Published to stellar reviews, Cooke's The American Home Front is a "valentine to his adopted country by someone who loved it as well as anyone and knew it better than most" (The Plain Dealer). A portrait frozen in time, the book offers a charming look at the era as it journeys through small towns, big cities, and the American landscape as they once were. The American Home Front is also a brilliant piece of reportage, a historical gem that "affirms Cooke's enduring place as a great twentieth-century reporter" (American Heritage).

"An interesting eyewitness record . . . It recalls transcontinental travel in the pre-interstate highway era, and with greater depth, social problems that Cooke detected beneath the win-the-war exhortations he encountered from coast to coast." --Booklist

About this title

About the Author

Born in England and educated at Cambridge, Yale, and Harvard, Alistar Cooke (1908-2004) became a U.S. citizen in 1941. He was awarded an honorary knighthood in 1973 and delivered the keynote address before both houses of Congress at the bicentennial celebrations in 1976. Cooke lived and worked in an apartment overlooking Central Park, where he raised his family and lived with his wife, Jane White, until his death.

From Booklist

Composed during World War II for British readers, whom the late cultural commentator Cooke felt had heard "rather too much of Washington and New York," this travelogue of America was never published--until now; it proves an interesting eyewitness record on several levels. It recalls transcontinental travel in the pre-interstate highway era, and with greater depth, social problems that Cooke detected beneath the win-the-war exhortations he encountered from coast to coast. Driving out of Washington in February 1942, Cooke headed south, observing the Jim Crow regime en route to Gulf Coast ports bursting with military construction and a housing crisis. He then took a train to California, where he was disgusted by the internment of Japanese Americans, then in full swing. Circling back east in a car via Seattle, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul, and the Great Lakes cities, Cooke discovered their war industries and ethnographic compositions. Perceptive about the moment, prescient about postwar possibilities, Cooke's tour makes for profitable reading. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Brilliance Audio on CD Unabridged
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0709071000
• ISBN 13: 9780709071006
• Binding: Audio CD