Memories of the Great and the Good

I read this book when it was first published almost a decade ago and recently re-read it after watching a television program about Alistair Cooke (November 20, 1908-March 30, 2004) that renewed my interest in his life and especially in those who attracted his interest as a journalist. My first encounter with Cooke occurred when my family and I watched "Omnibus," an educational television series, broadcast on Sunday afternoons from 1952 until 1961. Cooke served as host. He also attracted a great deal of favorable attention as the author of the "American Letter" program that was broadcast 58 years (from 1946 until 2004), re-named "Letter From America" after four years and eventually broadcast throughout the world by the BBC World Service. What we have in Memories of the Great & the Good are Cooke's personal profiles of 23 prominent persons who, for various reasons, attracted his attention. Although Cooke proudly identified himself as a journalist, I think he would not object if I prefer to characterize him as a cultural anthropologist because he had an almost insatiable curiosity about all areas of human endeavor. Consider the diversity of those whom he discusses in this book. They include George Bernard Shaw, Frank Lloyd Wright, both Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ross, Gary Cooper, Duke Ellington, Erma Bombeck, and Robert ("Bobby") Jones. He frequently expressed his appreciation for having "the privilege of roaming at will around every region" of the United States and in each dimension of its culture. He welcomed the "chance of acquiring what Theodore Roosevelt called `the sense of the continent'... It is the opportunity to meet all sorts and classes of humanity in their native habitat...soldiers and sailors of every rank, small businessmen of great imagination and comicality, a minor gangster forging U.S. graded beef, a burlesque stripper, a Texas sheep slicer, a modest, illiterate boy from the Carolinas with a genius for leadership in deadly situations in the Second World War." Fortunately, he shared his impressions and opinions with those who watched his various television programs, listened to his radio broadcasts, and/or read his newspaper and magazine articles as well as more than a dozen bestselling books. Whatever the given medium, Cooke was ever alert to significant details when encountering just about anyone and a master of figurative language when sharing those details with his reader, viewer or listener. Here are four brief excerpts that suggest the thrust and flavor of Cooke's unique style. In his suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York, Frank Lloyd Wright "lay stretched out on a sofa, his fine hands folded on his lap, a shawl precisely draped around his shoulders. He looked like Merlin posing as Whistler's Mother. Indeed, there was always s curiously feminine grace about him, but it was nothing frail or skittish. He looked more like a matriarch of a pioneering family, one of those massive western gentlewomen who

Prior to buying this volume of Alistair Cooke's writings, I knew him only as the former host of Masterpiece Theater, with his career as a journalist being only something I had heard about. The essays collected here are from various periods of Mr. Cooke writing career (1957 through 1999) and include a diverse group of people, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Irma Bombeck, Gary Cooper, Barry Goldwater and Eleanor Roosevelt . Each essay is rather short, averaging about ten pages. I read a comment by a reviewer that Mr. Cooke was excellent at creating a "portrait" of his subjects. While this is probably true, "Memoirs of the Great and Good" aims more at anecdotes and episodes, that Mr. Cooke elaborates upon, rather than having the detail and depth of a short biography. Many were written upon the death of the subject, so they are valedictory in tone. The essay about FDR relates an occurrence that happened to Mr. Cooke when he encountered the President as he was arriving to give a speech at Harvard. The last piece is a book review of "The Last Lion" by William Manchester, a biography of Winston Churchill, that gives us an insightful look into the early years of Churchill. In sum, I found these essays to be thoughtfully written and compulsive to read. It was surprising to realize how quickly I went through the book.

"Memories of the Great and the Good" is a collection of essays that, as much as introducing the more casual and less public sides of nearly two dozen luminaries, reveals the evolution of America and of Alistair Cooke. The pieces stretch from 1951 through 1999 and the most useful advice, repeated both in discussing Churchill's love of war and hatred of the idea of women's suffrage, and in dismissing the alleged racism of golfer Bobby Jones, is to beware the "shame of seeing a man out of his time." One reporter recently dubbed Cooke the Dorian Gray of journalism, perhaps both for having been silver-haired and apparently the same age for as many decades as not, and because it is difficult to tell to what time the man himself belongs. Even though he is my grandfather, I can be no help on that score; in recent years I have seen the replacement of a knee and an angioplasty (both of which he has mentioned in his weekly BBC "Letter from America") leave him as sprightly as I have ever known him.Each essay reflects the time of its creation, whether that was 1967 or 1999. The 1974 piece on Duke Ellington mentions a visit to the bandleader's flat "on the swagger side of Harlem," and comments, "There is such a place," the Duke being at the top of "the hierarchy of Negro social status." Yet the 1999 piece on FDR is most memorable for an account of the unexpected, unseen, and contemporarily unpublishable view of the president being carried out of a car and limping, assisted, into a giant hall. By urging the reader to look at his subjects in their times, he sometimes implicitly admonishes himself for failing to do so. "Wodehouse at Eighty," for one, shows the father of Jeeves unquestionably out of his time, an anachronism as viewed--and, to be honest, caricatured--by Cooke, in his early fifties at the time. In other essays he steps almost too much into the times and shoes of his subjects, for example when mirroring the outlook of Erma Bombeck, whose career "was that of her generation--brace yourselves!--mother and housewife." While many of the pieces attempt and succeed at portraying the individuals 'in their time,' a large number of the pieces were written far after 'their times' as obituaries, which should not be surprising as Cooke shares with every nonogenarian the fact of having seen an extraordinary number of players both step onto the stage and then take their bows and make their exits some time later.Combined with this historical span, what is truly worthy about this book is that, like his earlier "Six Men," it displays the extraordinary degree of access which he, as a foreign correspondent par excellence, enjoyed with a dizzying array of figures. George Bernard Shaw is in a behind-the-scenes committee discussing the pronunciation of proper "BBC English." "The General"--Eisenhower-- sits on his back porch, commenting on his golf and waiting for Cooke's t.v. crew to reposition themselves. And Duke Ellington is in hi

I purchased this book for my 13 year old son for Christmas, and took the liberty of reading it. I read Cooke's sections on George C. Marshall, Winston Churchill,Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Bobby Jones because I was familiar with all of them from other works. Cooke writes in a breezy style, butI believe he captures the noble, transcendent charateristics of each man.I enjoyed each sketch thorougly. His vignettes are all perceptive. I hope that this might spark my son's interest in reading more about these figures. Overall an excellent, quick read.