WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — The word "urbane" will officially go out of circulation around the year 2015 or so, because there won't be any people left to apply it to. But Alistair Cooke was genuinely urbane without ever being pretentious or hoity-toity about it. It was the way he thought and the way he lived, and he lent his particular grace to everything he wrote or spoke.
Alistair Cooke's "America" has been reissued by Basic Books. It was a follow-up to a 1973 PBS series he did about his adopted country and it sold almost 2 million copies. It's a big picture narrative history of America, and a lot more than a narration for a TV show. Cooke brings his bountiful love of America to it, but he doesn't miss our apparently endless capacity for childish delusion, either.
It's a timeless book that should be taught in schools as both a supplementary text for history classes and as a model of expository writing.
In the pipeline...
Twelve will publish a book by Evan Osnos about Westerners moving to China to live in pursuit of opportunity and adventure. Osnos is the China correspondent of The New Yorker and has lived there since 2005. ...
Holt will publish "The Reapers are the Angels," by Jonathan Gaylord, which is billed as "a literary zombie novel" and supposedly a cross between Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" and Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying." ... Pianist Byron Janis has sold a memoir to Wiley; co-authoring with Janis will be his wife, Maria Cooper Janis, the only child of Gary Cooper.
Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: scott(underscore)eyman(at)pbpost.com.