The American Home Front: 1941-1942 - Hardcover

Cooke, Alistair

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0871139391 ISBN 13: 9780871139399

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Born in England and educated at Cambridge, Yale, and Harvard, Alistar Cooke (1908-2004) became a U.S. citizen in 1941. He was awarded an honorary knighthood in 1973 and delivered the keynote address before both houses of Congress at the bicentennial celebrations in 1976. Cooke lived and worked in an apartment overlooking Central Park, where he raised his family and lived with his wife, Jane White, until his death.

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
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About this edition

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0871139391
• ISBN 13: 9780871139399
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336