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Cargando... Memories of the Great and the Goodpor Alistair Cooke
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. A nostalgic reflection at the age of 90 upon a charmed life by one of the world's outstanding broadcasters. Born in England, Alastair Cooke became an American citizen and lived in the USA since 1937. His much-loved Letters from America, now transmitted to 52 countries, are the longest-running one-man series in the history of broadcasting. The unmistakeably dry humour, the consciously modulated voice, the down to earth candour and the sensitivity to human nature, all of which mark his inimitable style, are reassuringly here in this selection of broadcast reminisciences of his friends and acquaintances who include politicians like George Wallace and Barry Goldwater, jazzman Duke Ellington, golfer Bobby Jones, round the world yachtsman Francis Chichester, actor Gary Cooper and poet Robert Frost. Alistair Cooke writes in the preface to this collection of 23 biographical sketches, "Most of these pieces tend to find, and rejoice in, what is best about their subjects." That is not to say that the distinguished British print and broadcast journalist (resident for many years in America) is starry-eyed about the men and women he profiles: George Bernard Shaw was a crank; Frank Lloyd Wright a prima donna; General George Marshall an appalling public speaker. Yet Cooke's smooth prose and keen insights explore the larger issues his subjects' stories raise and invite readers to appreciate the people who have made a difference. Franklin Roosevelt's visionary leadership was possible because of a gentleman's agreement with the press inconceivable today: they never printed a single photo of him in his wheelchair. FDR's vice president, John Nance Garner, was a Southern politician who understood only power and back-scratching: "There is one man left who is like him," Cooke wrote in 1967, "Lyndon Johnson"--cogently and simultaneously nailing LBJ's strength and weakness. Politicians and statesmen preponderate here (Cooke's Winston Churchill portrait is justly famous), but the author covers writers (P.G. Wodehouse, Robert Frost), performers (Gary Cooper, Duke Ellington), and columnists (James Reston, Erma Bombeck) with equal shrewdness. --Wendy Smith. Deploring the current fashion for psycho-biographies, not to mention porno-biographies, of the famous, Alistair Cooke offers celebrations of people he has met during his sixty years of journalism, people he calls the Great or the Good, people who, he believes, have left the world a better or more interesting place. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
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Over the course of his distinguished career as a foreign correspondent, which spanned more than sixty years, Alistair Cooke had known, interviewed, or reported on literally hundreds of the most influential men and women of the twentieth century. Here he has collected his memories of more than a score of them: they include actors and generals, statesmen and eccentrics, a poet, a jazzman, an intensely scholarly woman and a casually funny one, an architect, a publisher, and several politicians--all of whom, in Cooke's view, have left the world a better or more interesting place. Here, then, are scintillating portraits of characters as far apart as George Bernard Shaw and Duke Ellington, as different as the humorist Erma Bombeck and the Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock. Recounting the trials of Sir Francis Chichester, the lonely global yachtsman, or analyzing the very different but equally indomitable spirit of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Alistair Cooke allows us to understand a little better the nature of courage. His fond and sensitive recollections of P. G. Wodehouse and Gary Cooper salute two unpretentious geniuses in the ostentatious world of entertainment. His account of his long and relaxed weekend with President Dwight Eisenhower is sensitive and revealing, as is his candid but compassionate portrait of an earlier president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. His meeting with Ronald Reagan during the future president's early years as governor of California is as insightful as it is prescient. The book ends with moving and memorable portraits of two men Cooke especially admires, for different reasons: one, Winston Churchill, who for all his human flaws was "most certainly great," and the other, Bobby Jones, whom Cooke regards as "one of the three or four finest human beings I've ever known." No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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