J W M Thompson
Across-The-Pond Life
Letters from America: 1946-2004
By Alistair Cooke
Allen Lane The Penguin Press 504pp £25 order from our bookshop
This fairly hefty volume contains transcripts of upwards of a hundred of the late Alistair Cooke’s celebrated broadcasts. I calculate that if every one of his ‘Letters from America’ were to be collected they would fill about thirty equally bulky books: a reminder that while the quality of Cooke’s journalistic output has been widely recognised, his sheer professional productivity is not to be taken for granted either.
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