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  • Published: 1 November 2010
  • ISBN: 9781408454558
  • Imprint: BBC DL
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 14 hr 1 min
  • Narrator: Peter Marinker
  • RRP: $32.99

Alistair Cooke's America



Alistair Cooke's classic "personal history" of America, telling the story of the USA from the Mayflower to Pearl Harbour.

For years legendary broadcaster Alistair Cooke brought America to the rest of the world with incomparable wit and wisdom. This is his classic "personal history" of America, guiding us through centuries of changing life in the USA. Beginning with his own arrival in America as a graduate in the 1930s, Alistair Cooke discusses the explorers who put their new-found land on the map, the pioneers who tamed the Wild West, the soldiers who fought for independence and the tycoons who built fortunes. From the Mayflower to the gold rush, the jazz age to Pearl Harbour, with figures as varied as Buffalo Bill, John D. Rockefeller and Martin Luther King, here is the defining portrait of America.

  • Published: 1 November 2010
  • ISBN: 9781408454558
  • Imprint: BBC DL
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 14 hr 1 min
  • Narrator: Peter Marinker
  • RRP: $32.99

About the author

Alistair Cooke

Alistair Cooke was born in 1908 in Salford, Lancashire. His birth name was Alfred, but he changed it to Alistair at the age of 22. In 1932, he won a Harkness Fellowship to Yale and Harvard, and he emigrated to America in 1937, where he scripted a regular Letter from London missive for NBC. In 1941, Cooke became an American citizen, and in 1946 he began broadcasting American Letter for the BBC (the programme's name was changed to Letter from America in 1950). The show's remit was to introduce his adopted country to his homeland by means of 'a weekly personal letter to a Briton by a fireside about American life and people and places in the American news'. It was immensely popular, and ran for 2869 broadcasts over 58 years - the longest-running one-man series in broadcasting history. Cooke received an honorary knighthood for his contribution to Anglo-American understanding in 1973. He died in 2004.

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