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. The Adventures of Herbie Cohen follows our hero from his youth spent running around Brooklyn with his pals Sandy Koufax, Larry King, Who Ha, Inky, and Ben the Worrier (many of them members of his Bensonhurst gang, "the Warriors"); to his days coaching basketball in the army in Europe; to his years as a devoted and unconventional husband, father, and freelance guru crossing the country to give lectures, settle disputes, and hone the art of success while finding meaning in this strange, funny world.
[A] treat of a new book ... As his son tells it, his dad’s career was in its way even more dazzling than Koufax’s ... Rich Cohen writes lovingly of his father’s 'love of bull—.' But the accumulated wit and wisdom of Herb Cohen scattered through the book reveals instead a keen grasp of human frailty and a gift for aphorism no less valid for its glibness ... There’s much more compelling family drama in the book, especially the death of Rich Cohen’s mother, told so movingly that many will read the passage in tears. But it’s essentially the saga of a remarkable man who’s fond of saying 'The meaning of life . . . is more life' and knows what he’s talking about.
Wry and affectionate ... In Cohen’s telling, Herbie is a latter-day Buddha preaching a detached philosophy of life as an all-encompassing negotiation in which one should 'care, but not that much' ... The book also reads as a classic Jewish American striver’s saga ... This is a rich and beguiling homage to a larger-than-life father.
