The Adventures of Herbie Cohen: World's Greatest Negotiator

by Rich Cohen

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250867148
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	05/09/2023
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	1,100,159
Product dimensions:	4.80(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Rich Cohen is the New York Times bestselling author of Tough Jews, Monsters, Sweet and Low, The Fish That Ate the Whale, The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones, The Chicago Cubs, The Last Pirate of New York, Pee Wees, and, with Jerry Weintraub, When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead. He is a cocreator of the HBO series Vinyl, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and a writer at large for Air Mail. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s Magazine, among other publications. Cohen has won the Great Lakes Book Award, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, and the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. He lives in Connecticut.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

July 30, 1968

Place of Birth:

Lake Forest, Illinois

Education:

B.A., Tulane University, 1990

Editorial Reviews

"[A] wildly entertaining story of a man with boundless energy and philosophical pizazz." —Rick Kogan, The Chicago Tribune

"[A] treat of a new book . . . 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. . . 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." —Edward Kosner, The Wall Street Journal

"Wry and affectionate . . . This is a rich and beguiling homage to a larger-than-life father." —Publishers Weekly

"[Rich] 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 . . . A thoroughly entertaining combination of memoir and biography." —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

02/07/2022

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. (May)

Publishers Weekly

04/02/2022

Family has been a fertile topic for Rich Cohen. Having tackled his mother's irascible clan in Sweet and Low (his grandfather created the artificial sweetener Sweet 'N Low) and his own parenthood in Pee Wees: Confessions of a Hockey Parent, the author here turns his eye to his father Herb Cohen—dubbed "the world's best negotiator" by Playboy magazine in 1980. Cohen traces how a Jewish kid from Brooklyn became the man who handled negotiations for top corporations and two U.S. presidents. Herb always followed three simple principles, the book explains: care, but not too much; never negotiate for yourself; and understand every player in the game has something at stake. Well aware of his father's foibles and flaws, author Cohen effectively balances rackety anecdotes about his father roaming his childhood patch of Bensonhurst with Sandy Koufax and Zeke the Greek (later and better known as Larry King) and coaching ragtag U.S. Army basketball on the German front during World War II. He also thoughtfully looks at how Herb Cohen's personality and antics translated into being a father, and how his high-profile career affected his wife and family. VERDICT A fast-paced, clear-eyed view of a colorful character and a complicated father. Any library with Rich Cohen's other works (or Herb Cohen's best seller You Can Negotiate Anything) will find this a solid add for their collections.—Kathleen McCallister

Library Journal

Actor Paul Adelstein narrates in a way that Brooklyn-born Herb Cohen might have sounded in his prime: confident, strong, and with a hint of know-it-all impatience. With Adelstein’s clear vocal tone and unwavering clarity, he is a wonderful choice to narrate these sharp-witted anecdotes about a unique American personality. The son of Jewish immigrants, Cohen was trained as an attorney but became an expert on negotiating—the art of “caring about your interests, but not too much.” The author, Herb’s son and a prolific nonfiction author, writes with a similar New York City vibe, a crisp style that is full of energy and well-crafted observations. With rich lessons and colorful family stories, this is an entertaining glimpse of one man’s life and legacy. T.W. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2022 - AudioFile

Actor Paul Adelstein narrates in a way that Brooklyn-born Herb Cohen might have sounded in his prime: confident, strong, and with a hint of know-it-all impatience. With Adelstein’s clear vocal tone and unwavering clarity, he is a wonderful choice to narrate these sharp-witted anecdotes about a unique American personality. The son of Jewish immigrants, Cohen was trained as an attorney but became an expert on negotiating—the art of “caring about your interests, but not too much.” The author, Herb’s son and a prolific nonfiction author, writes with a similar New York City vibe, a crisp style that is full of energy and well-crafted observations. With rich lessons and colorful family stories, this is an entertaining glimpse of one man’s life and legacy. T.W. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2022 - AudioFile

2022-02-15
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.

Kirkus Reviews