Our Recent Past
Cooke, Alistair
Our Recent Past AMERICA OBSERVED By Alistair Cooke Alfred A. Knopf. 223 pp. $9.95. Now eighty years old, Alistair Cooke recently announced that he has no intention of retiring. The genial host...
...His interests range from politics to sports, from cult figures like Marilyn Monroe and Gary Cooper to social issues...
...He is eloquent on civil rights and liberties...
...Cooke is a social and political observer with an ear for humor, an eye for nuance, and a keen awareness of American virtues and shortcomings...
...Throughout, they make entertaining social history...
...Ronald A. Wells, an American historian, has here selected an assortment of Cooke's "Letters from America" covering the 1940s to the 1980s...
...These crisp reports are vivid reminders of our recent past...
...The genial host of public television's Masterpiece Theater has reported to Europe on the American scene for more than forty years as the Manchester Guardian's correspondent...
Vol. 53 • February 1989 • No. 2
