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The American Home Front: 1941-1942
Books: Text Books: American Government: Item 2
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The American Home Front: 1941-1942by Alistair Cooke
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful: From sea to shining sea, June 3, 2006 Reviewer:Jon Hunt (Old Greenwich, Ct. USA) - As one of countless Americans who remember Alistair Cooke as the voice of "Masterpiece Theatre" it's refreshing to know, professionally, from whence he came. His recollections (from his role as the BBC's originator of "Letter from America" and gathered in "The American Home Front") tell us of a younger Cooke in his quest to find out how Americans viewed the Second World War during its first year. His book is a masterpiece, indeed. In early 1942, the author set out from Washington D.C. and headed south and west. Some months later he finished his journey in New York and what he witnessed on his trip around the United States is a reader's delight. I'm struck by one thing at first....our pictorial history of the Second World War is largely viewed through black and white photos and newsreels. Alistair Cooke's commentary immediately adds color. One suspects that Cooke had not even remotely traveled around America when he set off and his trip must have been awe-inspiring for this young British reporter who had recently become an American citizen. He speaks of the extreme poverty of the south and its basic, rural distance from the war but as he moves west he encounters oil in Texas, pleasant country in Arizona and a sudden self-immersion into war efforts as he reaches California. Cooke proceeds north through Oregon and Washington, noting its beautiful, tall fir trees but also a disassociation by people of the northwest with their California cousins. He circles back east via Montana, Wyoming and Kansas and seems to be taken by the fertile fields of the American midwest. For these citizens the war is more remote, but no less significant. Cooke relates wonderful tidbits of information. Landlocked Iowa, for instance, sent more men to the U.S. Navy than any other state per capita. Along the way, he not only gives us his colorful snapshots of ordinary people going about their business in extraordinary times, but he also gives a unique gift of writing about the sounds and smells of each place. All of this done, mind you, without much more than a whiff of humor, addressed buttoned-up, English style. How comparable are his findings of certain subjects with regard to today! Texans in 1942 speak bewilderingly about gas rationing when one interviewee talks of oil flowing as never before. Any reader wanting to be a little more enlightened about current Mexican immigration should read his passages with regard to such. Yet there are differences, too. He takes note of the solidly Democratic south and the rock-ribbed Republicans of Vermont. How some things change! What makes this book so unusual is that I've never read anything like it before. Had it been chronicled by an American, certain prejudices would surely have been exposed. While Cooke keeps a jaundiced reporter's eye on his work as his trek continues, he nonetheless is fast becoming an American patriot, as witnessed in his "envoi" which completes the book. "The American Home Front" is history told from a vantage point not found in schoolbooks and it is written as well by a supreme diarist. Although we know much more about how the war ended, Alistair Cooke's contribution is his descriptions of events and the feelings of Americans at the beginning of the war. He has done so in a magnificent way.
From Booklist
Composed during World War II for British readers, whom the late cultural commentator Cooke felt had heard "rather too much of Washington and New York," this travelogue of America was never published--until now; it proves an interesting eyewitness record on several levels. It recalls transcontinental travel in the pre-interstate highway era, and with greater depth, social problems that Cooke detected beneath the win-the-war exhortations he encountered from coast to coast. Driving out of Washington in February 1942, Cooke headed south, observing the Jim Crow regime en route to Gulf Coast ports bursting with military construction and a housing crisis. He then took a train to California, where he was disgusted by the internment of Japanese Americans, then in full swing. Circling back east in a car via Seattle, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul, and the Great Lakes cities, Cooke discovered their war industries and ethnographic compositions. Perceptive about the moment, prescient about postwar possibilities, Cooke's tour makes for profitable reading. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
From the famous BBC correspondent and television host comes a remarkably insightful and detailed firsthand portrait of America during the early days of World War II. Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Alistair Cooke, a newly naturalized American citizen, set out to see his country as it was undergoing monumental change. Cooke traveled small highways, with their advertising signs and their local topography, in an age before the interstate highway system.
In The American Home Front — a fascinating artifact, a charming travelogue, and a sharp portrait of America — Cooke chronicles the regional glories he encounters and the reactions of the citizens to war, from indifference to grief, from opportunism to resilience under military threat. Filled with touching personal stories of the effects of war, from a Japanese family facing internment that tries to sell Cooke their car, to the experiences of the unemployed relocating in hopes of jobs in a gunpowder factory, The American Home Front is the work of an experienced, talented journalist; it is intelligent, touching, and funny.
© Adapt, Inc. 1998-2006
In The American Home Front — a fascinating artifact, a charming travelogue, and a sharp portrait of America — Cooke chronicles the regional glories he encounters and the reactions of the citizens to war, from indifference to grief, from opportunism to resilience under military threat. Filled with touching personal stories of the effects of war, from a Japanese family facing internment that tries to sell Cooke their car, to the experiences of the unemployed relocating in hopes of jobs in a gunpowder factory, The American Home Front is the work of an experienced, talented journalist; it is intelligent, touching, and funny.
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