THE ADVENTURES OF HERBIE COHEN

The eventful life of a renowned strategist.

Rolling Stone contributing editor Cohen, who has written about baseball, football, Jewish gangsters, and kids hockey, offers an affectionate portrait of his remarkable father, as amusing as it is tender. Brooklyn-born Herb Cohen, the son of “uneducated Polish émigrés,” worked his way up from insurance agent to become an internationally acclaimed expert in the art of the deal. A sought-after speaker, he gave as many as 250 presentations per year in boardrooms, at conventions, and in university lecture halls. He consulted at the departments of State, Justice, and Treasury and at the CIA. He taught FBI agents how to negotiate with terrorists, and he advised Jimmy Carter about negotiating with Iran during the hostage crisis. In 1980, he shared his insights in a self-help book, You Can Negotiate Anything: How To Get What You Want, which sold more than 1 million copies. “At the core,” his son writes, “all his lessons were about the same thing: empowerment. He tried to wake people up to the power they had without knowing it. He especially loved advising the underdog, the self-defeated who has been crushed by the institution, the machine.” Cohen recounts his father’s adolescence in Bensonhurst, where he was part of a raucous yet harmless gang that called itself the Warriors. Among its members was Larry Zeiger, who grew up to become Larry King. All the boys took nicknames: Herb’s was Handsomo. He was “a Damon Runyon character, a street corner raconteur,” and a man “of tremendous appetites. For comedy, success, love, and food. He was one of those human yo-yos who can gain or drop a hundred pounds in a few months. Binge and fast. Consume and forsake. Sin and repent.” A son, brother, husband, and father, Herb was, above all, someone who could never ignore a chance to stand up to authority; he was happiest, his son observed, as “a freelance injustice fighter.”

A thoroughly entertaining combination of memoir and biography.