Search results for ""Author Alistair Cooke""

This now classic portrait of Douglas Fairbanks - the swashbuckling original King of Hollywood - was first published in 1940. Long out of print and hard to find, Alistair Cooke's posthumous biography was the first serious consideration of the career of the great silent screen star and husband of America's sweetheart, Mary Pickford. Reissued here in a facsimile edition, Douglas Fairbanks: The Making of a Screen Character treats, step by step, the course of Fairbanks' career, and sheds light on the mysterious ingredients of screen popularity and on the history of motion pictures generally. Alistair Cooke, the distinguished journalist and broadcaster, was assistant to Charlie Chaplin when he met Iris Barry, MoMA's first film curator, in 1938. Barry invited Cooke to participate in the Museum's groundbreaking film course at Columbia University and commissioned him to write Douglas Fairbanks: The Making of a Screen Character.

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A defining collection from Alistair Cooke's legendary BBC Radio broadcasts, guiding us through nearly sixty years of changing life in the United States'No one else succeeded in explaining to the English-speaking world ... the idiosyncrasies of a country at once so familiar, and yet so utterly foreign' IndependentWhen Alistair Cooke retired in February 2004 he was acclaimed as one of the greatest broadcasters of all time. His Letter from America radio series, which began in 1946 and continued every week for fifty-eight years until his retirement, kept the world in touch with what was happening in America. Cooke's wry, humane and liberal style both informed and entertained his audience. The selection here, made largely by Cooke himself and supplemented by his literary executor, gives us the very best of these legendary broadcasts. It covers key moments from the assassination of Kennedy through to the Vietnam War and Watergate to 9/11, the Iraq War and anticipates the 2004 elections. It includes portraits of the great and the good from Charlie Chaplin to Martin Luther King, Jr, and topics as varied as civil rights, golf, jazz and the changing colours of a New England fall. Each Letter contributes to a captivating portrait of a nation - and of a man.

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