Composed during World War II for British readers, whom the late cultural commentator Cooke felt had heard "rather too much of Washington and New York," this travelogue of America was never published--until now; it proves an interesting eyewitness record on several levels. It recalls transcontinental travel in the pre-interstate highway era, and with greater depth, social problems that Cooke detected beneath the win-the-war exhortations he encountered from coast to coast. Driving out of Washington in February 1942, Cooke headed south, observing the Jim Crow regime en route to Gulf Coast ports bursting with military construction and a housing crisis. He then took a train to California, where he was disgusted by the internment of Japanese Americans, then in full swing. Circling back east in a car via Seattle, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul, and the Great Lakes cities, Cooke discovered their war industries and ethnographic compositions. Perceptive about the moment, prescient about postwar possibilities, Cooke's tour makes for profitable reading.
