Showing results by narrator "Rich Cohen" in All Categories

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.  

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.

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. 

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books began in 1996 with a simple goal: to bring together the people who create books with the people who love to read them. The festival was an immediate success and has become the largest and most prestigious book festival in the country, attracting more than 130,000 book lovers each year.