Rich Cohen has narrated 5 audiobooks on Listento.it by 1 author, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 12 ratings. The most-rated is The Last Pirate of New York.
The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones
Summary
A gritty, one-of-a-kind backstage account of the world’s greatest touring band, from the opinionated music journalist who was along for the ride as a young reporter for Rolling Stone in the 1990s One of the Top Five Rock Biographies of the Year (San Francisco Chronicle) One of the Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews) 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. Cohen is equally as good on the low points as the highs, and he puts his finger on the moments that not only defined the Stones as gifted musicians schooled in the blues, but as the avatars of so much in our modern culture. In the end, though, after the drugs and the girlfriends and the bitter disputes, there is the music - which will define, once and forever, why the Stones will always matter. “Fabulous.... The research is meticulous.... Cohen’s own interviews even yield some new Stones lore.” (The Wall Street Journal) “[Cohen] can catch the way a record can seem to remake the world [and] how songs make a world you can’t escape.” (Pitchfork) “No one can tell this story, wringing new life even from the leathery faces of mummies like the Rolling Stones, like Rich Cohen.... The book beautifully details the very meaning of rock ’n’ roll.” (New York Observer) “Masterful.... Hundreds of books have been written about this particular band and [Cohen’s] will rank among the very best of the bunch.” (Chicago Tribune)
©2016 Rich Cohen (P)2016 Random House Audio
The Last Pirate of New York
Summary
Was he New York City’s last pirate...or its first gangster? This is the true story of the bloodthirsty underworld legend who conquered Manhattan, dock by dock - for fans of Gangs of New York and Boardwalk Empire. “History at its best...I highly recommend this remarkable book.” (Douglas Preston, number one New York Times best-selling author of The Lost City of the Monkey God) 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. His criminal career reached its peak in 1860, when he was hired, under an alias, as a hand on an oyster sloop. His plan was to rob the ship and flee, disappearing into the teeming streets of lower Manhattan, as he’d done numerous times before, eventually finding his way back to his nearsighted Irish immigrant wife (who, like him, had been disowned by her family) and their infant son. But the plan went awry - the ship was found listing and unmanned in the foggy straits of Coney Island - and the voyage that was to enrich him instead led to his last desperate flight. Long fascinated by gangster legends, 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, to his ultimate incarnation as a demon who terrorized lower Manhattan, at a time when pirates anchored off 14th Street. Advance praise for The Last Pirate of New York: “A remarkable work of scholarship about old New York, combined with a skillfully told, edge-of-your-seat adventure story - I could not put it down.” (Ian Frazier, author of Travels in Siberia) “With its wise and erudite storytelling, Rich Cohen’s The Last Pirate of New York takes the reader on an exciting nonfiction narrative journey that transforms a grisly nineteenth-century murder into a shrewd portent of modern life. Totally unique, totally compelling, I enjoyed every page.” (Howard Blum, New York Times best-selling author of Gangland and American Lightning)
©2019 Rich Cohen (P)2019 Random House Audio
Screen Door Slam
Summary
What’s the best way to spend a summer evening? 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. Cohen named the team The North Shore Screen Doors, hence the fight song, “Screen Door Slam”, inspired by 1985’s "Super Bowl Shuffle". (“We ain’t out there just to get a tan / we’re out there doing the Screen Door Slam.”) The Screen Doors played just two seasons. The first was glory, but the second, by which time the kids had begun to grow apart, was an error-filled mess, which is why, in late July, Cohen called on his father, famed negotiator Herb Cohen (“Herbie”) to fix the team. A titanic struggle followed, as Herbie, using all his grown-up shrewdness, negotiating prowess, and sports knowledge, wrested control and remade the team in time for a pennant run. Along the way, several timeless questions come up: What’s more important, fun or winning? Family or friends? Speed or power? This is a story of perfect seasons, friends, games that only seem important, and how a long summer night ends in the cool dawn of adulthood. In it, Cohen has attempted to create a new genre of sports journalism (“Cosmic Little League”) and also add to his greater project of doing for Chicago’s North Shore what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County and Springsteen did for Asbury Park. It’s got softball, fields where the dirt blows, heroes and villains, trickery and negotiation, fathers and sons, and characters, each of whom could anchor his own John Hughes movie. This is The Bad News Bears had those punks reconvened for one more run at the title.
©2020 Rich Cohen (P)2020 Audible Originals, LLC.
Sweet and Low
Summary
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 factory, and conducting interviews with members of his extended family. Along the way, the 40-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.
©2006 Rich Cohen (P)2006 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC
Herbie
Summary
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. The story of that decision and the resulting struggle takes us from the winter streets of Chicago to the candy-colored bars of New Orleans to the glory of late 20th century Manhattan, while raising certain fundamental questions: What’s the difference between constructive and destructive criticism? What can a father do to help his child and when has he gone too far? Is it worth telling a bully to f--k off even if it may determine the direction of the rest of your life? You will meet indelible characters along the way, especially Herbie, the author’s father (author of the classic business book You Can Negotiate Anything) who wears two watches, one on each wrist, because, as he says, "A man with one watch thinks he knows the time, while a man with two watches can never be sure." At once funny and serious, this story is perfect for any parent wanting to help their kids find their way in the world, or for any kid who just wants to be free.
©2019 Rich Cohen (P)2019 Audible Originals, LLC.