Alistair Cooke's The American Home Front

The US publication by Grove Atlantic of Alistair Cooke's The American Home Front has received superb reviews in The New York Times, the Chicago Sun Times and the Washington Post. The reviewers noted as follows:

""The American Home Front" will come as a revelation to American audiences who knew Mr. Cooke only as the urbane host of "Masterpiece Theater" or of the BBC series "America" or, for that matter, of his weekly "Letter From America," a BBC radio broadcast that ran from 1946 to 2004. In addition to being a broadcaster, Mr. Cooke was a print reporter, and a superb one, with a sharp, skeptical eye and a stylish pen. Both are on brilliant display here.

Despite the grim circumstances, "The American Home Front" can be read, with great pleasure, as nothing more than a colorful travelogue, given poignancy by the passage of time."

William Grimes, The New York Times, 24th May 2006


"The prose is, in the best sense of the word, polished -- novelists should be as gifted as Cooke at capturing the beauties of nature -- with striking, even elegant, metaphors and similes. Washington, D.C., in wartime was "a boom-town based on a gusher of memoranda."

In describing the roundup and internment of Japanese Americans, he notes that they traveled "across barren flats where the afternoon sun makes the streaks of salt shine as painfully as turned swords." Far from being just self-indulgent lyricism, that tells us something explicit about their situation and surroundings."

Roger K. Miller, Chicago Sun Times, 7th May 2006

"In his later years, especially after he became the host of "Masterpiece Theatre," Cooke acquired a decidedly benign, avuncular air and became near-universally beloved, with the consequence that people tended to forget that, though he was a passionately loyal American, he could also be sharply critical of his adopted country. He understood, perhaps more keenly than most native Americans, that ours is a land of deep contradictions, capable of great generosity yet susceptible to smugness and arrogance. In his last years, he often spoke to his British listeners of his apprehensions about this country's future, and there are hints of this concern in his account of America at war. Thus, it is not surprising that much of what Cooke says here remains pertinent."

"The war may have been far away, but the nation was very much at war. Overall, the people responded energetically and selflessly, though there was plenty of shirking and profiteering; the black market thrived. Of course we've known all this for years, so "The American Home Front" doesn't really alter our understanding of what things were like then, but it is, in effect, a letter from the front lines, and the immediacy of it is real and valuable."

Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post, 16th May 2006

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The UK edition, under the title Alistair Cooke's American Journey, will be published by Penguin/Allen Lane in July.

A preview of this edition has recently appeared in The Independent on Sunday.