"Americans are not particularly good at sensing the real elements of another people's culture. It helps them to approach foreigners with carefree warmth and an animated lack of misgiving. It also makes them, on the whole, poor administrators on foreign soil .... If Americans should have to govern large numbers of foreigners, you must expect that Americans will be well hated before they are admired for themselves."
Alistair Cooke spoke those words May 6, 1946, in a radio piece titled "The Immigrant Strain." Reading them today through glasses colored by distrust, dislike, even hatred of Americans on the part of much of the Arab world, one has to ask what magnificent combination of genes, education and instinct allowed this distinguished British observer of the American psyche to so totally pinpoint its essence?
Cooke perhaps was best known in the US as the eloquent translator of British imports to American television, most notably PBS' Masterpiece Theater. But the inhabitants of his native land knew him better as an expert character witness in the case of their American cousins, a talent who used his melodious voice to weave insightful and enlightening verbal
tapestries.
More than one obituary and newspaper commentary likened him to an earlier foreign observer of democracy and all things American, Alexis de Tocqueville. It was -- and is -- an apt comparison.
Cooke's voice may be silent, but the world is not without his legacy, a compilation of 58 years of his BBC broadcasts titled Letter From America: 1946-2004.
From national holidays to political contests to summers by the sea in the Hamptons, Cooke detailed and explained issues and events -- large and small -- to his British listening audience.
He was particularly drawn to describing all-American personalities, among them Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Duke Ellington, Westbrook Pegler, Charles Lindbergh, HL Mencken, Robert Frost, Martin Luther King, Jr, General George Marshall, Colonel Robert McCormick, Joe Louis, Ed Koch and Charlie Chaplin.
Readers of this anthology of selected American history will be enriched not only by Cooke's magnificent command of the language but also by the Englishman's kind-spirited and powerful love for his adopted country.
In a day when the US is described as more divided than at any other time in history. Cooke's Oct. 16, 1969, broadcast is worth reading: "In a self-governing Republic -- good government in some places, dubious in others -- three thousand miles wide, eighteen hundred miles long, with fifty separate states which in many important matters have almost absolute powers -- with two hundred million people drawn from scores of nations, what is remarkable is not the conflict between them but the truce."
By Jeff Guinn
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Beginning in 1989 with A Time To Kill, Grisham resurrected the courtroom-based thriller as a staple of popular fiction. Sixty million copies sold later, he's succeeded too well.
Every third novel that hits store shelves seems to feature lawyers, and Grisham is clearly tired of rehashing the same essential plot (conflicted young lawyer discovers scruple, foils bad guys).
Grisham's new thriller, The Broker, attempts to genre-jump within the confines of suspense fiction. Protagonist Joel Backman is a lawyer, but one who has spent far less time in courtrooms than in backrooms, where he and his minions cut shady lobbyist deals with any willing government on behalf of near-criminal clients.
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