For years legendary broadcaster Alistair Cooke brought America to the rest of the world with incomparable wit and wisdom. This is his now classic and irresistibly readable 'personal history' of America, guiding us through centuries of changing life in the US.Beginning with his own arrival in America as a graduate in the 1930s, Alistair Cooke goes on to write about the explorers who put their new-found land on the map, the pioneers who tamed the Wild West, the soldiers who fought for independence and the tycoons who built fortunes. From the Mayflower to the gold rush, the jazz age to Pearl Harbour, with portraits of figures as varied as Buffalo Bill, John D. Rockefeller and Martin Luther King, here is the American story in all its triumphs and failures, grandeurs and tragedies. It is the defining portrait of a nation.