Cooke’s Tour

America By Alistair Cooke

Knopf, 400 pp., $15 It is easy to fault Alistair Cooke’s America on points of emphasis and interpretation. He passes over slavery too quickly and omits any mention of the Confederate leadership during the secession crisis and the Civil War. His discussion of Reconstruction shows that he is out of touch with even the mildest revisionist writings of the past generation. Andrew Jackson is treated only in the context of his Indian policy (which, to be sure, is important