The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C.S. Lewis

From a short review to a quite long one, to round out the month of October.

The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C.S. Lewis

The Discarded Image was the last book that C.S. Lewis wrote, and in essence it summarises a number of lectures and talks he gave on the subject of Medieval and Renaissance Literature — the subject he taught for the greater part of his lifetime. The ‘image’ in question is a complete and complex picture of history, science, and theology that served as the foundation for literature in the Western world from the turn of the first millennium A.D. up until around the early 1600s. In the space of a little over 200 pages, Lewis picks this intricate and detailed image apart to show the pieces that make up the whole, before putting everything back together again to point out the places where the whole contributed to how authors, historians, philosophers, and religious writers wrote about the various facets of the world they knew.

Explaining the entirety of the book would be tedious and would force me to set aside an interesting and noteworthy point. As with the majority of Lewis’s non-fiction writings, it’s very easy to see how his scholarly research and religious studies influenced the worlds he created — not just Narnia and its inhabitants, but also the planets of the Space Trilogy, the bureaucratic Hell of The Screwtape Letters, and even the twilight town and pre-dawn countryside of The Great Divorce. One quote in particular reminded me of different aspects of the fiction I’ve read:

[in a discussion of how man can have Free Will if God is omniscient]

Strictly speaking, He never foresees; He simply sees. Your ‘future’ is only an area, and only for us a special area, of His infinite Now. He sees (not remembers) your yesterday’s acts because yesterday is still ‘there’ for Him; he sees (not foresees) your tomorrow’s acts because He is already in tomorrow. As a human spectator, by watching my present act, does not at all infringe its freedom, so I am none the less free to act as I choose in the future because God, in that future (His present) watches me acting.

I’m reminded here of Aslan’s comment to Lucy in The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’: ‘I call all times soon’. But something of this is also present in Screwtape’s comments to Wormwood about the restricted ways by which tempters can influence the free will of a ‘patient’, and also (I believe) is hinted at in The Great Divorce when the spirit of George MacDonald is talking to Lewis’s Dantean avatar about choices and decisions. This is only one passage of several that illustrate ideas and thoughts that Lewis drew upon in his world-creation, or so it seemed to me when I was going through the book on my initial read-through.

Far be it from me to attribute all of Lewis’s writings to ideas covered in this particular book. Yet Lewis fans will likely find it a treat, even though it is probably best enjoyed if you have at least read Dante’s Divine Comedy and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales beforehand. I’ll end this review with a second quote from the book, one which is near the end and which rather nicely sums up the underlying structure of the book’s thesis:

It follows that the book-author unit, basic for modern criticism, must often be abandoned when we are dealing with medieval literature. Some books — if I may use a comparison I have used elsewhere — must be regarded more as we regard those cathedrals where work of many different periods is mixed and produces a total effect, admirable indeed but never foreseen nor intended by any one of the successive builders.

I’m not familiar enough with a wide spread of medieval and Renaissance literature/history/philosophy/religious writings to judge this statement on my knowledge alone. But from what I’ve read and from what others (who are far more knowledgeable about this subject than I am) have told me, Lewis was most definitely an expert in his field and his observations are spot-on.

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas

I thought my review of this was longer, but I think it says pretty much all of what I wanted to say about this very good book.

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas

Keith Thomas’s book is a classic study of the effect that the social and religious upheavals of the Reformation had on traditional folk beliefs in England — the ‘magic’ of which he speaks. Magic, in this sense, was not necessarily the magic of evil witchcraft — maleficium, as it tended to be known in those days — but rather the span of the occult and esoteric that ranges from astrology and horoscopes to Christian prayers for the sick. Any serious attempt to change or determine the course of one’s life through supernatural means would fall under Thomas’s definition of magic. This mundane kind of magic was often an integral part of daily life in pre-Reformation England, and the changes in English society that took place between 1550 and 1688 soon meant that magic, in the traditional sense, would fade into little more than the folk sayings and superstition that remain with familiar today.

Religion and the Decline of Magic is a footnote lover’s dream, with copious citations of period sources and later commentaries woven into the text. Thomas provides fascinating insights into the origins of folk sayings and prevalent myths, as well as the prominence of horoscopes and star-gazing, which were used to learn the most auspicious day to do anything from setting out on a journey to having one’s tooth pulled. As a book about the history of the English Reformation and its effects on society — leading into Oliver Cromwell’s time — Religion and the Decline of Magic presents a particularly useful sociological study. It’s a lengthy work, but worth looking into if you have any interest in the origins of folk history and the deep and abiding connections between the sacred and profane worlds.

Wodehouse: A Life by Robert McCrum

I originally picked up a copy of this book as a gift for a friend, and ended up getting one for myself as well — mostly to prevent myself from reading the gift copy. Is ‘one owner/reader from new’ still acceptable as a gift book? I’m never really sure.

Wodehouse: A Life by Robert McCrum

The English writer Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975) is probably best known for Jeeves, the inimitable gentleman’s gentleman, and his rather brainless but well-intentioned master Bertie Wooster. But the team of Jeeves and Wooster was only one facet of Wodehouse’s immense literary canon. He also wrote a series of stories centred around the antics of the denizens of Blandings Castle (many of which focus on the Empress of Blandings, a corpulent prize-winning pig), another group of stories about a dashing young City gentleman named Psmith (the ‘p’ is silent, as in ‘pneumonia’ and ‘ptarmigan’), as well as many other separate novels, short stories, and song lyrics — all of which add up to an immense volume of work for any one writer.

Wodehouse had a gift for devising elaborate farcical plots that often seem so complex as to be insoluble, and his prose is pretty much unforgettable to anyone who has dipped into even one or two of his works. And yet it’s incredible to think that Wodehouse never went to university — indeed, he spent the first few years of his working life writing stories late into the night and going to a dull, uninspiring job at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank by day. In person, he appears to have been singularly uninteresting, shy and asocial, and was almost incapable of taking any situation sufficiently seriously…or at least, he preferred to make light of difficulties and display a stereotypical sort of ’stiff-upper lip’ personality to the outside world. This last trait eventually caused no end of trouble for him in an episode that is not often remembered today. Wodehouse and his wife were stranded in occupied France during World War II, and while he was a prisoner in an enemy alien internment camp he was invited to make a series of radio broadcasts from Berlin about his life as an internee. Wodehouse’s attitude on the air was genial, almost jocular, and some of his innocent remarks led some members of the press and public to denounce him as a Nazi collaborator and propagandist along the lines of Lord Haw-Haw. After the war’s end, Wodehouse discovered that he was in deep disgrace — and that his public image had been severely damaged by his association with the Nazi propaganda machine.

That backstory aside, Robert McCrum’s biography of Wodehouse is superbly done, a detailed and well-crafted account of a literary life. If I had one reservation to make about the writing style, I would draw attention to the fact that McCrum seems to want to exonerate his subject at the expense of good prose-writing. He over-emphasises Wodehouse’s relative ignorance of international politics — or if not over-emphasises it, then at least is less than subtle in his description of it. Sentences like ‘This was the conversation that would lead inexorably to his disgrace’ feel a bit forced at times. (My instinctive reaction to a sentence like that is, ‘Yes, thank you, Story, now may we continue from where you left off?’) But that is to nitpick at what is otherwise a lovely and well-researched literary biography, definitely recommended to fans of the Wodehouse canon.

Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942-45 by David Reynolds

I first picked up this book for a course on Anglo-American relations from World War II to the end of the Cold War. I don’t normally look into military-type history, but I suppose it helped that this book happens to be more about military culture than on campaigns and battles.

Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942-45 by David Reynolds

The story of American GIs in Britain has two sides: that of the British military and civilian population, who often dismissed the GIs as ‘over-sexed, over-paid, over-fed, and over here’; and that of the GIs themselves, who returned the cutting remarks by claiming that the British military were ‘under-sexed, under-paid, under-fed, and under Eisenhower’. Some American soldiers got on very well with the British people they met, quite often with young British women whose heads were turned by the smartly-dressed Yanks. But the problems and conflicts between the British and the GIs created some very ugly incidents, especially when black GIs were involved. The official segregation of the American forces forced both the Americans and the British to go to extraordinary lengths to keep the races separate — because the sight of a white British woman and a black American soldier walking out together was all too often the spark for an explosive confrontation.

David Reynolds has done his research well for Rich Relations, and does his best to be balanced in interpreting the often conflicting information that comes out of official memos and personal recollections. He separates the book into sections devoted to the official information from the top brass and the collected experiences of the individuals involved. Some of the stories are funny and many are sad, but some are particularly touching — one black GI recalls how he became fast friends with an older British couple who lived near his base camp, including the birthday party they gave for him which featured a small iced cake they had baked from their meagre rations (no sugar in the cake, only in the icing). There are quite a lot of good stories of this nature, and the book is rich in detail and interesting to explore.

Rich Relations does suffers a little from repetition in certain parts — do we really need to be reminded four times in the space of about two hundred pages that the pre-war black population of Britain numbered around 8,000 people? I must also admit that I skimmed through the parts dealing with battles and troop mobilisations, the parts that a military historian or World War II buff would probably find more interesting. I would not have minded if the sections about the D-Day invasions had been trimmed slightly; after all, the book is supposed to focus on the experience in Britain, rather than on the Continent. Yet the book does its job extremely well, shedding light on a fascinating time in Anglo-American (or should that be ‘Yank and Limey’?) relations.

Fourth Among Equals by Bill Rodgers

I can’t use the ‘dead politicians’ tag on this post, since Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank is still very much with us. TheyWorkforYou.com has a very nice profile of his most recent activity in the Lords, if you’re interested in such things.

Fourth Among Equals by Bill Rodgers

Bill Rodgers was one of the four founding members of the Social Democratic Party, the ‘Gang of Four’ as the press and the public soon dubbed them. Along with Roy Jenkins, David Owen, and Shirley Williams, Rodgers left the Labour Party in 1980 in response to the growing militancy of the Labour left and their trade union affiliates, particularly the creation of an electoral college that would have given the trade union block vote a definite and potentially deciding advantage on Party policy issues. They formed the Social Democratic Party, specifically distancing themselves by name from the word ‘labour’, which had lost its public appeal in the wake of the strikes and general social discontent of the late 1970s.

Rodgers was never as public a figure as his colleages. Roy Jenkins had name recognition as a former Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and European Commissioner, and had the carefully cultivated air of an elder statesman; David Owen had been the youngest Foreign Secretary ever, with a fiery style and a flare for the dramatic that served him well in debates in the Commons; and Shirley Williams was a committed European-ist and, well, a woman. (Which is not to underestimate her political abilities in the slightest — it is merely a reflection of politics at the time, for when Harold Wilson placed her in his Cabinet in the mid-1970s, his Cabinet was the first to have contained the grand total of two women.) Even the book’s title shows Rodgers’ wry acceptance of his position in the SDP’s collective leadership, since the title is a play on the idea of the Prime Minister as being primus inter pares (’first among equals’). If his choice of words is a ploy to lend credibility to his idea of himself as being a sort of detached observer of the meteoric rise and rapid decline of the SDP…well, for the most part, it seems to work in his autobiography.

The book starts off as many political memoirs do — the sense of community of the town where he was born, the family relationships and early connections to political life, the experiences that shaped his concept of politics, anecdotes of his time in National Service and at Oxford. (And like many memoirs, the section dealing with Rodgers’ time at Oxford University rather devolves into a list of ‘Eminent People I Might Have Once Seen Whilst Walking Through The Streets’.) Rodgers was a member and would later become a General Secretary of the Fabian Society, that wild-and-crazy pamphlet-producing hotbed of intellectual socialism. What Rodgers does succeed in creating from this long life story is a sense that breaking ties with the Labour Party was not at all an easy choice for him to make. The rise and decline of the SDP would take another book to explain fully, but Rodgers tells his side of the story with rather more regard for balanced opinion than what I’ve read from David Owen and Roy Jenkins. I actually found the parts where Rodgers talks about his work as a Liberal Democrat life peer in the House of Lords to be more interesting than the tales of SDP in-fighting and drawn-out political bargaining with David Steel’s Liberals.

So where do I stand on this book? It’s made me want to go back and reread David Owen’s memoirs (which I haven’t yet posted my review of here) to see where the two men disagree on what happened to the SDP. As a political memoir, it’s very readable and far less tiresome than some other memoirs I’ve read. But I can’t quite decide if the sense of disquiet I was left with when I closed the book was due to the sad story of the demise of the Gang of Four, or the strangely fatalistic calm with which Rodgers recounted it.

The Wilson Plot: How the Spycatchers and Their American Allies Tried to Overthrow the British Government by David Leigh

I’ve acquired a copy of the BBC2 television programme The Plot Against Harold Wilson, in which journalists Roger Courtiour and Barrie Penrose described how Wilson contacted them in the late 1970s to give them information about various plots against him during his premiership. It seems as good a time as any to post this little review.

The Wilson Plot: How the Spycatchers and Their American Allies Tried to Overthrow the British Government by David Leigh

Generally, I am not one for books on conspiracy theories. Most of the time they smack of lone individuals sitting in darkened rooms, meticulously crafting cunning hats out of aluminium foil ‘just in case’. And at times, The Wilson Plot veers into this realm — the full name of the book is overly dramatic, to say the least. But Observer journalist David Leigh’s account, published in 1988 the wake of the debacle over former MI5 officer Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, adds quite a lot of damning evidence to corroborate one of Wright’s more controversial claims: that certain well-placed members of the British (and American) secret services believed that Prime Minister Harold Wilson was an agent of the Soviet Union. Leigh sets out to prove that Wilson was not and could not have been on the Soviet payroll, and at the same time does his best to expose much of the darker side of Cold War espionage…including the often vicious ‘dirty tricks’ carried out against Wilson and many others who were unfortunate enough to fall foul of the Anglo-American ’spycatchers’.

First and foremost, ‘overthrow’ is not the right word at all in this context. British Intelligence’s intereference with Harold Wilson was not some kind of Mossadeq Lite or Nasser Mark II. Granted, some of the same ideas and thought trends that contributed to suspicions surrounding Wilson had roots in the same anti-Communist mania that powered both of the abovementioned incidents. There was a similar streak of paranoia involved as well — most notably concerning the unexpected death of the right-leaning Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, which some of the more obsessed chose to regard as a KGB-backed assassination that would allow Wilson to succeed to the Labour leadership and thence to the premiership. But none of the plots and plans that Leigh recounts come close to government-toppling. Most never got farther than sordid whispering campaigns, usually hinting that Wilson had been compromised in some nebulous sexual escapade involving either his political advisor Marcia Williams or Cabinet Minister Barbara Castle. The intelligence services’ fascination with sex and its use as a weapon is certainly nothing new, and in the political context it certainly comes across as the product of a number of people with more time on their hands than they really ought to have had.

What is disturbing, in Leigh’s account, are the power games that were rife within MI5 and MI6 during the Cold War — and the near-complete lack of accountability for the resulting damage and repercussions. The defections of Kim Philby and Guy Burgess led to more than a few in-house mole hunts that slandered reputations and destroyed careers. MI5’s decades-long cover-up of Sir Anthony Blunt’s war-time espionage appears to have played a key role in the 1967 suicide of Labour politician Bernard Floud. The testimony of rather suspect defectors like Anatoliy Golitsyn, amongst others, caused Anglo-American as well as inter-departmental strife. The people crafting the cunning aluminium foil hats in those days were wielding an unpleasantly large amount of power to make other people’s lives miserable. The Wilson Plot may be over the top and unnecessarily dramatic at times, but I think that Leigh’s underlying message cannot be overstated: There are those in the intelligence services whose view of the world is (to be frank) utterly divorced from reality, and if there is no sense of accountability for their actions then it is hardly surprising if innocent people are caught in the crossfire.

The War That Never Was: The Fall of the Soviet Empire 1985-1991 by David Pryce-Jones

Lest anyone think that I only review books that I enjoyed reading….

The War That Never Was: The Fall of the Soviet Empire 1985-1991 by David Pryce-Jones

The War That Never Was first came out in 1995, when a book of this nature was more in the line of ‘current events’ than ‘history’. At that point in time, there were quite a lot of people around who were very willing to talk about the part they had played in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Editor and author David Pryce-Jones travelled around the former Soviet Union and its constituent republics, collecting interviews with politicians, bureaucrats, former dissidents, and political commentators who had been in at the end of things, as it were. Through these interviews, Pryce-Jones is attempting to piece together the greater puzzle of how one of the world’s two superpowers simply fell apart in the space of less than a decade.

I wish I had more to say about the book, but to be perfectly truthful I found it incredibly difficult to get through it past the first few chapters. My difficulties started off with bits of Pryce-Jones’ running commentary that made me raise an eyebrow. Take, for instance, this passage:

President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher were unusual among world leaders in their genuine detestation of communism. It was a question of right and wrong. Moral outlook of the sort troubled neither post-war French Presidents nor German Chancellors.

In my opinion, I would say that it’s remarkably easy to make moral judgments when you’re not facing either immediate internal (French) or external (German) pressure from native communist movements — and that Reagan and Thatcher seemed to have few moral qualms about supporting some other regimes that may not have been communist but were certainly nowhere near democratic. I could keep quoting passages in a similarly conservative vein, ones where that damn the Helsinki Accords or snipe at George H.W. Bush for not being more aggressive to act in support of the nationalist movements in the Baltic countries. In essence, Pryce-Jones seems to think that if the Soviet Union was on its last legs by the late 1980s, the West would’ve been better off getting out the knives and finishing the job with more than a bit of relish. By the time I was halfway through the book, I was more than tempted to get out some knives of my own to hack and slash my way to the end.

I did finish this book, but it’s no longer on my bookshelf. I’ve no problem with debating the different choices that might have been made by Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and others — but Pryce-Jones seemed to keep repeating a few pet ideas and picking only the interviews to support his views. It might be moderately useful to read The War That Never Was as a representation of a particular kind of ideological mindset that shouldn’t be ignored outright, but I can’t imagine rereading except to pull quotations from it. And as far as that goes, I simply ended up copying out the quotes that I thought I might find useful and consigning this polemic masquerading as history to a used book store.

An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis

Dipping into the ‘wide high-table λόγος of St. C.S. Lewis’s Church’, as Betjeman so sardonically put it once upon a time. I’ve a few reviews of his other works that will have to go up here at some point, but this book really needs to stand by itself.

An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis

It’s common enough to talk about ‘good books’ and ‘bad books’, and yet the definition of what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in a book has as many variations as there are readers. Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code was a runaway bestseller, but bring it up in conversation and you might well be scoffed at for even mentioning that kind of paperback junk food. Harold Bloom has made a name for himself declaring that Stephen King’s books (and most any other work of so-called popular fiction) are beneath contempt and beyond the pale for those who consider themselves to be ’serious’ readers. And the ‘adult’ UK editions of Harry Potter, intended for those who are shy about being seen on Tube or train with the brightly-coloured covers of the regular books, would seem to indicate that the sense of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ extends into children’s literature as well. It is the question of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ books that C.S. Lewis addresses in his short work An Experiment in Criticism: he looks at how people judge the literary value of a given book, examining in particular how (in his opinion) most judgements focus too much on the book itself and not on the way in which the book is read.

An Experiment in Criticism, at first, seems designed to make the curious reader wince within the first five pages. From the start, Lewis draws a very sharp line between the ‘literary’ and the ‘unliterary’ reader, and deliberately places the literary reader in a kind of close-knit elite. He soon identifies the kind of books that the unliterary reader is likely to read, if indeed that reader even picks up a book at all: romance-laden short stories in women’s magazines or sensationalist adventure novels, for instance. Unliterary readers will almost never read a book again if they’ve read it once before. They turn to reading as a last resort — to help them sleep at night, or to pass time on a long journey, or simply to kill time before something else happens. Most of all, the unliterary reader almost never talks about the book afterwards, except to pass some sort of superficial judgement on it: ‘I liked it’ or ‘It was boring’. But Lewis does not suggest that unliterary readers are unliterary because they look at books from this perspective — rather, he believes that unliterary readers do not look at books from any other perspective. His interest lies more in how literary readers look at books, and how their particular prejudices influence how books are appraised and either praised or condemned.

For instance, science fiction and fantasy are two genres that tend to be dismissed by literary readers as poorly written escapist tripe, or in general as stories meant only for children (and therefore ‘childish’ or otherwise unsuitable for a serious reader). Lewis suggests that the literary reader should only use ‘childish’ in this derogatory sense to mean behaviours and attitudes that are or should be left behind in childhood. In this sense, throwing a temper tantrum when frustrated or angry is childish; enjoying engaging, powerful, and well-written fantasy stories, regardless of their popularity or trendiness, is not. An Experiment in Criticism, in this regard, takes a step back from specific criticism and looks at the critics themselves, picking apart how and why people judge books and looking more closely at the superficial judgements that literary readers are themselves capable of making about certain books and those who read them.

Fans of C.S. Lewis’s writings will quite possibly get a good deal of enjoyment out of An Experiment in Criticism, I think, if they are willing to overlook some of his more prickly (and, I will admit, condescending) moments. But the point of the book is not so much to pass a lasting and final judgement on how books ought to be criticised. It is an experiment in literary criticism — and in that sense, it throws out a number of intriguing ideas and serves as a starting point to open the subject to a much wider debate.

Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley

I was quite surprised to see the response to my last language-related post. I doubt I’ll get the same reaction for this one, but it’s as interesting a book as the other one was.

Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley

Most books that deal with threatened or extinct languages set out from the start to demonise English. I’ve seen the words ‘parasitical’, ‘pernicious’, and ‘malignant’ used to describe the effect of the English language on other languages in the world. Mark Albey’s book does point to the spread and popularity of English as a significant factor in the decline of many languages, but instead of simply lamenting the loss of some of the world’s more complex tongues, he takes the time to go to places in the world where languages that were threatened with dying out have made a comeback, or are trying to make a comeback. And more importantly, he attempts to analyse the success stories, and see if there are ways that techniques used by revitalised language-speakers can be harnessed to save languages that have not been so fortunate in the past few decades.

In Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, Abley travels to remote villages in Australia and the American Southwest, to the Isle of Man and to the south of France and to the Caucasus mountains in search of languages that are struggling against extinction. As well as indigenous languages, he also explores the languages of immigrant communities, most notably when he interviews a group of Yiddish speakers in his native Canada. And arguably the best parts of the book are the parts where he speaks about the languages themselves, describing patterns of speech and turns of phrase that would sound unutterably alien to a native English speaker but which are extremely revealing about a language’s history and its ties to the culture in which the language developed.

All in all, Abley argues, it is the linguistic ties to culture that makes the preservation of languages so important. The subject-verb-object structure of English says quite a bit about the importance of the self/subject to an English speaker, but what can be inferred about culture from a language where the subject appears in the middle of the verb, or where verbs can exist without separate subjects, or where the concept of both subject and verb don’t really exist in that language? Spoken Here is a travel book and a linguistics book combined, and the combination works well enough to make it worth looking at.

Letter from America by Alistair Cooke

I thought I’d posted this already, but it seems that I hadn’t yet. I need to start keeping closer track of the reviews I’ve posted compared to the ones I still need to post — now that I’ve cleared out a bit of my backlog, I may soon be able to start posting reviews of books I’ve read more recently.

Letter from America by Alistair Cooke

Depending on which side of the Atlantic Ocean you’re from, the name of Alistair Cooke conjures up a different set of sounds and images. For most people in the States, Cooke was the voice and image of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, his plummy tones borne through the television set on the regal trumpet fanfare of Jean-Joseph Mouret’s ‘Rondeau’. And because he hosted Masterpiece Theatre for the better part of two decades, to most Americans Cooke’s name is synonymous with high-brow costume dramas and classic British television imports. But for many British people, Alistair Cooke is best known for his ‘Letters from America’ — his weekly 15-minute broadcasts on Radio 4, a stunning 2,869 broadcasts in total that ran from March 1946 to March 2004. And it is these ‘letters’, or a good selection of them, that make up this book.

Five decades’ worth of broadcasts leaves a lot of material to choose from. Some of his letters had been published earlier, in books that are now out of print, but the letters from the 1990s and 2000-2004 had been uncollected previously. And it’s a sign of the editors’ skill in selection that there’s no sense of repetition in the selected letters, and that some of Cooke’s most powerful letters have their rightful place in this collection. His letters concerning the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy are masterful — particularly the latter, since Cooke was present in the hotel kitchen when the younger Kennedy was shot. He wrote about Vietnam and Watergate, about September 11th and the war in Iraq…but he also wrote about the beauty of Christmas in Vermont, about family holidays on Long Island, about life in America and how it changed in the years he lived there.

Letter from America is probably one of those books that you’d think to buy for someone else, or might see on a table in a bookshop and wonder if it’s worth purchasing or merely flipping through. But I’m glad to have purchased this book, because Alistair Cooke was, if nothing else, a cherished institution for Americans and Britons alike. And a collection of his broadcasts, even a partial one such as this, is fine reading material.