Customer Reviews
A Partial Review - By: , 19 Dec 1999 
"Memories of the Great & the Good" is a collection of essays that, as much as introducing the more casual & less public sides of nearly two dozen luminaries, reveals the evolution of America & of Alistair Cooke. The pieces stretch from 1951 through 1999 & the most useful advice, repeated bothin discussing Churchill's love of war & hatred of the idea of women's suffrage, &in dismissing the alleged racism of golfer Bobby Jones, is to beware the "shame of seeing a man out of his time." One reporter recently dubbed Cooke the Dorian Gray of journalism, perhaps both for having been silver-haired & apparently the same age for as many decades as not, & because it is difficult to tell to what time the man himself belongs.
Even though he is my grandfather, I can be no help on that score;in recent years I have seen the replacement of a knee & an angioplasty (both of which he has mentionedin his weekly BBC "Letter from America") leave him as sprightly as I have ever known him.
Each essay reflects the time of its creation, whether that was 1967 or 1999. The 1974 piece on Duke Ellington mentions a visit to the bandleader's flat "on the swagger side of Harlem," & comments, "There is such a place," the Duke being at the top of "the hierarchy of Negro social status." Yet the 1999 piece on FDR is most memorable for an account of the unexpected, unseen, & contemporarily unpublishable view of the president being carried out of a car & limping, assisted, into a giant hall. By urging the reader to look at his subjectsin their times, he sometimes implicitly admonishes himself for failing to do so. "Wodehouse at Eighty," for one, shows the father of Jeeves unquestionably out of his time, an anachronism as viewed--and, to be honest, caricatured--by Cooke,in his early fifties at the time. In other essays he steps almost too much into the times & shoes of his subjects, for example when mirroring the outlook of Erma Bombeck, whose career "was that of her generation--brace yourselves!--mother & housewife." While many of the pieces attempt & succeed at portraying the individuals 'in their time,' a large number of the pieces were written far after 'their times' as obituaries, which should not be surprising as Cooke shares with every nonogenarian the fact of having seen an extraordinary number of players both step onto the stage & then take their bows & make their exits some time later.
Combined with this historical span, what is truly worthy about this book is that, like his earlier "Six Men," it displays the extraordinary degree of access which he, as a foreign correspondent par excellence, enjoyed with a dizzying array of figures. George Bernard Shaw isin a behind-the-scenes committee discussing the pronunciation of proper "BBC English." "The General"--Eisenhower-- sits on his back porch, commenting on his golf & waiting for Cooke's t.v. crew to reposition themselves. And Duke Ellington isin his boxers & a towel, devouring breakfast at two p.m. These are the kind of stories that I've heard come out over drinksin his study, or on Christmas afternoonin Vermont, as if they were the most pedestrian, ordinary experiences ...
"Memories of the Great & the Good" offers a rare look, at Cooke (long an icon of Britain to Americans &in icon of America to Britain) & at many of the most important actors on the stage of the twentieth century. I truly hope you will enjoy it.
