"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.
The 50ish Backman's final grand deal is his undoing. Three youthful Pakistani hackers first discover a secret breakthrough satellite spy system put in place by an unidentified nation and then invent a software program capable of controlling it. Backman represents the trio in peddling the software, alienating the various world powers who wanted to buy it, the still-anonymous nation that launched the unparalleled satellite spyware and the US government, which consi-ders his actions treasonable.
Backman's intention to fight his own government in court dissolves when the Pakistanis and one of Backman's own high-profile employees die under suspicious circumstances. He pleads guilty to one charge of treason and disappears into what he believes will be the seedy sanctuary of federal prison.
But certain US spymasters still want to know who, exactly, is running that satellite surveillance system -- Backman insists he has no idea -- and so a scheme is hatched to pardon Backman, ostensibly place him in a witness protection program outside US borders, tip off various foreign intelligence agencies to where he is, and then watch to see who tries hardest to kill him. That, FBI plotters believe, will reveal who's behind the better-than-ours technology.
Packed off to Bologna, Italy, Backman soon figures out what must be going on and, devoid of all the trappings of wealth and power he once enjoyed, must somehow foil everybody who wants him dead. Will he manage to pull this off? Do you even have to wonder?
In this switch to an espionage rather than legal-themed thriller, Grisham seems to be channeling John le Carre, the acknowledged master in that field. In the tradition of le Carre, Grisham fills The Broker with lots of descriptive passages about quirky neighborhoods and crumbling architecture.
But we've read and been thrilled by John le Carre. John le Carre is a fabulous crafter of nuanced espionage fiction. Grisham, you're no John le Carre.
Grisham is a reasonably gifted storyteller with a nice sense of plot pace. Because the vast majority of readers want easy entertainment rather than intellectual challenge, over the past 15 years he has become America's most popular novelist, bar none.
It's understandable that he'd like to break out of his overall thematic rut, and he's talented enough to keep The Broker intermittently interesting. But ultimately, The Broker is the printed equivalent of a breath mint. It might cause momentary tingling, but nothing more.
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