American Journey

This enthralling account of Alistair Cooke’s travels through America during the Second World War was thought to have been lost for years. but then it was rediscovered just before his death. Within weeks of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, Cooke set off to see the effects of the war on ordinary Americans, from miners to lumberjacks, Pullman porters to peanut farmers and even Japanese-Americans interned in stark desert prison camps, The result is an extraordinary travelogue, celebrating the spirit of a nation that would inspire Cooke’s legendary broadcasts for the next sixty years.