Showing results by author "Rich Cohen" in All Categories

When Samuel Zemurray arrived in America in 1891, he was tall, gangly, and penniless. When he died in the grandest house in New Orleans 69 years later, he was among the richest, most powerful men in the world. In between, he worked as a fruit peddler, banana hauler, dockside hustler, and plantation owner. He battled and conquered the United Fruit Company, becoming a symbol of the best and worst of the United States: proof America is the land of opportunity, but also a classic example of the corporate pirate who treats foreign nations as the backdrop for his adventures.

Here is the story of Jerry Weintraub: the self-made, Brooklyn-born, Bronx-raised impresario, Hollywood producer, legendary deal maker, and friend of politicians and stars. No matter where nature has placed him - the club rooms of Brooklyn, the Mafia dives of New York's Lower East Side, the wilds of Alaska, or the hills of Hollywood - he has found a way to put on a show and sell tickets at the door.

Award-winning writer Rich Cohen excavates the real stories behind the legend of infamous criminal enforcers Murder, Inc. and contemplates the question: Where did the tough Jews go?

In Pee Wees: Confessions of a Hockey Parent, Rich Cohen takes us through a season of hard-fought competition in Fairfield County, Connecticut, an affluent suburb of New York City. Part memoir and part exploration of youth sports and the exploding popularity of American hockey, Pee Wees follows the ups and downs of the Ridgefield Bears, the 12-year-old boys and girls on the team, and the parents watching, cheering, conniving, and cursing in the stands.

For Rich Cohen and millions of other fans, the Chicago Cubs have always been more than a team: they've been the protagonists of a King Arthur epic, in search of the Holy Grail that is winning the World Series. A chronicle of the last few miraculous seasons as experienced through the prism of Cubs history, The Chicago Cubs tracks the famous curse, which was placed on the team in 1945 by the infamous owner of the Billy Goat Tavern, who was ejected from Wrigley Field when he tried to bring his goat into the grandstand for the fifth game of the World Series.

The 1980s were a transformative decade for the NBA. The 1987–88 season was the peak of that golden era, a year of incredible drama that featured a pantheon of superstars in their prime. In When the Game Was War, bestselling author Rich Cohen tells the story of this incredible season through the four teams, and the four players, who dominated it: Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics, Magic Johnson and the Los Angeles Lakers, Isiah Thomas and the Detroit Pistons, and a young Michael Jordan and his Chicago Bulls.

During World War II, in a Lithuanian ghetto, three comrades took courageous action against their German invaders: Abba Kovner, a Jewish partisan leader, produced a manifesto that called for his fellow Jews to take up arms against the Nazis; his future wife Vitka Kempner joined the FPO, a resistance organization; their friend, Ruzka Korczak, also joined the FPO, eager to strike back at their oppressors. Together, this trio served at the center of the underground movement in Lithuania.

For Rich Cohen and millions of other fans, the 1985 Chicago Bears were more than a football team: they were the greatest football team ever - a gang of colorful nuts, dancing and pounding their way to victory. They won a Super Bowl and saved a city. It was not just that the Monsters of the Midway won but how they did it....

Meet Herbie Cohen, World’s Greatest Negotiator, dealmaker, risk taker, raconteur, adviser to presidents and corporations, hostage and arms negotiator, lesson giver and justice seeker, author of the how-to business classic You Can Negotiate Anything. And, of course, Rich Cohen’s father.

A book inspired by a lifelong appreciation of the music that borders on obsession, Rich Cohen’s fresh and galvanizing narrative history of the Rolling Stones begins with the fateful meeting of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on a train platform in 1961 - and goes on to span decades, with a focus on the golden run - from the albums Beggars Banquet (1968) to Exile on Main Street (1972) - when the Stones were at the height of their powers.

Handsome and charismatic, Albert Hicks had long been known in the dive bars and gin joints of the Five Points, the most dangerous neighborhood in maritime Manhattan. For years, he operated out of the public eye, rambling from crime to crime, working on the water in ships, sleeping in the nickel-a-night flops, drinking in barrooms where rat-baiting and bear-baiting were great entertainments. Rich Cohen tells the story of this notorious underworld figure, from his humble origins to the wild, globe-crossing, bacchanalian crime spree that forged his ruthlessness and his reputation.

Sweet and Low is the amazing, bittersweet, hilarious story of an American family and its patriarch, a short-order cook named Ben Eisenstadt who, in the years after World War II, invented the sugar packet and Sweet'N Low, converting his Brooklyn cafeteria into a factory and amassing the great fortune that would destroy his family.

Every life reaches that crucial intersection, the place where you must choose your fate, or have it chosen for you. For best-selling author Rich Cohen (The Fish That Ate the Whale, The Last Pirate of New York), it came in a writing workshop senior year in college, when, at 17, he had to knuckle under to a ruthless professor or make a righteous, self-defeating stand.  

Chandler's dark first novel is full of endlessly inventive wordplay, with the wry, cynical, private detective Philip Marlowe. Join the investigation with Jonathan Lethem ( Gun, With Occasional Music and Fortress of Solitude), Judith Freeman ( The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and The Woman He Loved), and Rich Cohen ( Sweet and Low: A Family Story) as they compare notes on Chandler's grand style, its place in the mystery canon, and its influence on their work.

For many of us, it’s playing softball with friends, under the lights, a cooler of beer in the dugout. In the late 1980s, author Rich Cohen, then a senior in high school, assembled a team of ne’er-do-wells - gear heads, burnouts, goof balls, and the possibly gifted - to compete in what Cohen considered the best 12-Inch softball league in the Lower 48. Think Field of Dreams, but, instead of a cornfield in Iowa, these games were played behind a grade school in Glencoe, Illinois, on Chicago’s North Shore.

It's a great irony that Israel was more secure as an idea than its ever been as a nation with an army. In AD 70, when the Second Temple was destroyed, a handful of visionaries saved Judaism by reinventing it - by taking what had been a national religion, identified with a particular place, and turning it into an idea. Jews no longer needed Jerusalem to be Jews.

From the best-selling author of The Fish That Ate the Whale, Sweet and Low, and Tough Jews comes Make Your Own Mistakes, a candid, short memoir that chronicles Rich Cohen’s transition to young adulthood in New York City and beyond. Both amusing and thoughtful, this is the story of Rich’s quest to lead a life outside the confines of his father’s dream for him.