The Adventures of Herbie Cohen
World's Greatest Negotiator
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3.7 • 14 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The New York Times bestselling author Rich Cohen tells the story of Herbie: the king of Bensonhurst, the world’s best negotiator—and Cohen’s wise, wisecracking father.
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.
This book is an ode to a remarkable man by an adoring but not undiscerning son, and a treasure trove of hilarious antics and counterintuitive wisdom. (Some of this stuff you can use at home.) It’s a bildungsroman, a collection of tall tales, the unfolding of a unique biography coiled around Herbie’s great insight and guiding principle: The secret of life is to care, but not that much.
Includes black-and-white photographs
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A deal-making guru bargains with the world in this wry and affectionate biography. Journalist and editor Cohen (Sweet and Low) profiles his father, Herb Cohen, author of the bestselling business self-help title You Can Negotiate Anything, an adviser to the Reagan administration in arms negotiations with the Soviets, and the popularizer of the phrase "win-win." 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." A consummate operator, he's forever getting friends out of jams, bluffing his way into snooty restaurants sans reservations, and overflowing with wised-up aphorisms ("The meek shall inherit the earth, but not its mineral rights"). Full of vivid characterizations and sly wit (Herbie insisted on rewriting his son's grade-school reports, "which explains the frequent mention of Bensonhurst and the Brooklyn Dodgers in my schoolwork"), the book also reads as a classic Jewish American striver's saga, following Herbie from prewar Brooklyn—where his pals included future talk show legend Larry King—to the blandness of Chicago's suburbs, to Florida's retiree purgatory. His successes breed neuroses, including an ironically "over-caring" obsession with a bogus plagiarism lawsuit that he battled for years instead of negotiating a win-win settlement. This is a rich and beguiling homage to a larger-than-life father. Photos.
