A New York Times Notable BookWinner of the Great Lakes Book Award and the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public LibraryRaised in an affluent suburb on the North Shore of Chicago, Rich Cohen had a cluster of interesting friends, but none more interesting than Jamie Drew. Fatherless, reckless, and lower middle class in a place that wasn’t, Jamie possessed such an irresistible insouciance and charm that even the teachers called him Drew-licious. Through the high school years of parties and Cub games and girls, of summer nights on the beach and forbidden forays into the blues bars of Chicago’s notorious South Side, the two formed an inseparable bond. Even after Cohen went to college in New Orleans (Jamie went to Kansas) and then moved to New York, where he had a memorable interlude with the legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, Jamie remained oddly crucial to his life. Exquisite and taut, Lake Effect is a bittersweet coming-of-age story that quietly bores to the essence of friendship and how it survives even as it is destined to change.

Lake Effect

History

Rich Cohen

Americas

KNOPF

Sweet and Low: A Family Story

Biographies & Memoirs

JONATHAN CAPE.

There are many books about Israel, but none like this. From Rich Cohen, the author of the acclaimed Tough Jews, The Avengers, and Sweet and Low, comes a new approach to a story we thought we knew. Breaking through the heated polemics and intractable politics, Israel Is Real is a fresh voice, a tale of people and ideas, of the background of present-day Israel. Cohen relates Israel's story as that of a place long ago destroyed and transformed into an idea ...and which, sixty years ago, was retransformed into a place, and therefore into something that can once again be destroyed. From the medieval false prophets, to the nineteenth-century Zionists, and on to present-day figures like Ariel Sharon, Cohen tells the stories of the people obsessed with this fine line between place and idea, creation and destruction. He reclaims from obscurity a multitude of figures marginalised by history, but whose lives are key to any real understanding of Israel.

Israel Is Real

A legendary tale, both true and astonishing, from the author of Israel is Real and Sweet and LowWhen Samuel Zemurray arrived in America in 1891, he was tall, gangly, and penniless. When he died in the grandest house in New Orleans sixty-nine years later, he was among the richest, most powerful men in the world. In between, he worked as a fruit peddler, a banana hauler, a dockside hustler, and a plantation owner. He battled and conquered the United Fruit Company, becoming a symbol of the best and worst of the United States: proof that 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. In Latin America, when people shouted “Yankee, go home!” it was men like Zemurray they had in mind.            Rich Cohen’s brilliant historical profile The Fish That Ate the Whale unveils Zemurray as a hidden kingmaker and capitalist revolutionary, driven by an indomitable will to succeed. Known as El Amigo, the Gringo, or simply Z, the Banana Man lived one of the great untold stories of the last hundred years. Starting with nothing but a cart of freckled bananas, he built a sprawling empire of banana cowboys, mercenary soldiers, Honduran peasants, CIA agents, and American statesmen. From hustling on the docks of New Orleans to overthrowing Central American governments, from feuding with Huey Long to working with the Dulles brothers, Zemurray emerges as an unforgettable figure, connected to the birth of modern American diplomacy, public relations, business, and war—a monumental life that reads like a parable of the American dream. 

The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King by Rich Cohen (2012-06-05)

Professionals & Academics

Jonathan Cape Ltd.

TheNew York Times bestselling gripping account of a once-in-a-lifetime football team and their lone championship season 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. On offense, there was high-stepping running back Walter Payton and Punky QB Jim McMahon, who had a knack for pissing off Coach Mike Ditka as he made his way to the end zone. On defense, there was the 46: a revolutionary, quarterback-concussing scheme cooked up by Buddy Ryan and ruthlessly implemented by Hall of Famers such as Dan "Danimal" Hampton and "Samurai" Mike Singletary. On the sidelines, in the locker rooms, andin bars, there was the never-ending soap opera: the coach and the quarterback bickering on TV, Ditka and Ryan nearly coming to blows in the Orange Bowl, the players recording the "Super Bowl Shuffle" video the morning after the season's only loss. Cohen tracked down the coaches and players from this iconic team and asked them everything he has always wanted to know: What's it like to win? What's it like to lose? Do you really hate the guys on the other side? Were you ever scared? What do you think as you lie broken on the field? How do you go on after you have lived your dream but life has not ended? The result isMonsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, a portrait not merely of a team but of a city and a game: its history, its future, its fallen men, its immortal heroes. But mostly it's about being a fan--about loving too much. This is a book about America at its most nonsensical, delirious, and joyful.

Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones

The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones

BooksOnTape

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. It is also the story of immigrants to the New World, sugar, saccharine, obesity, and the health and diet craze, played out across countries and generations but also within the life of a single family, as the fortune and the factory passed from generation to generation. The author, Rich Cohen, a grandson (disinherited, and thus set free, along with his mother and siblings), has sought the truth of this rancorous, colorful history, mining thousands of pages of court documents accumulated in the long and sometimes corrupt life of the factor, and conducting interviews with members of his extended family. Along the way, the forty-year family battle over the fortune moves into its titanic phase, with the money and legacy up for grabs. Sweet and Low is the story of this struggle, a strange comic farce of machinations and double dealings, and of an extraordinary family and its fight for the American dream.

Sweet and Low

Sound Library

A tour-de-force history of Jews, blues, and the birth of a new industry.  On the south side of Chicago in the late 1940s, two immigrants—one a Jew born in Russia, the other a black blues singer from Mississippi—met and changed the course of musical history. Muddy Waters electrified the blues, and Leonard Chess recorded it. Soon Bo Diddly and Chuck Berry added a dose  of pulsating rhythm, and Chess Records captured that, too. Rock & roll had arrived, and an industry was born.  In a book as vibrantly and exuberantly written as the music and people it portrays, Rich Cohen tells the engrossing story of how Leonard Chess, with the other record men, made this new sound into a multi-billion-dollar business—aggressively acquiring artists, hard-selling distributors, riding the crest of a wave that would crash over a whole generation. Full of absorbing lore and animated by a deep love for popular music, Machers and Rockers is a smash hit. 12 illustrations.  About the series: W. W. Norton and Atlas Books announce the launch of a dynamic new series: ENTERPRISE pairs distinguished writers with stories of the economic forces that have shaped the modern world—the institutions, the entrepreneurs, the ideas. Enterprise introduces a new genre—the business book as literature.

Machers and Rockers: Chess Records and the Business of Rock and Roll

Norton, W.W.

Caution! No English version! Polish release.

Sun the Moon the Rolling Stones

Arts & Photography

Music

Headline

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rich Cohen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Rich Cohen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rich Cohen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Lake Effect

Sweet and Low: A Family Story

Israel Is Real

The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King by Rich Cohen (2012-06-05)

Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football

The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones

Sweet and Low

Sweet and Low

Machers and Rockers: Chess Records and the Business of Rock and Roll

Sun the Moon the Rolling Stones