The Adventures of Herbie Cohen: World's Greatest Negotiator
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. The World’s Greatest Negotiator, deal maker, and chance taker, Brooklyn-born Jewish Buddha, adviser to presidents and corporations, arms and hostage negotiator, lesson giver and justice seeker, author of the how-to classic You Can Negotiate Anything, and, of course, Rich Cohen’s father.
This book is the story of a singular man. It follows Herbie from his youth, running around Brooklyn with pals Sandy Koufax, Larry King, Who Ha, and Ben the Worrier (his Bensonhurst gang “the Warriors”), to his days in the army, coaching basketball across Europe, to the years he spent crossing the country giving lectures, doing deals, and teasing out every trick in the book for getting by and for finding meaning in this strange and funny life.
The Adventures of Herbie Cohen is an ode to a remarkable man from his son and a treasure trove of homegrown wisdom and unbelievable antics. It is bildungsroman, a collection of stories, and the unfolding of a life coiled around Herbie’s great insight and guiding principle: The secret of life is to care, but not that much.
Reviews
Wall Street Journal
Dutiful sons often revere their fathers for their instruction in the ways of the world—by direction and indirection, sterling example and train wreck. I cherish my father’s simple credos: “People are funny” (they can be full of grace or something else), “You get nothing for nothing” (seek true value, not bargains), and “Put a smile on your face, boy!” (face the world with confidence).
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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 thatmuch.” 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.