“An excellent, vividly written” (The Washington Post) account of leadership in wartime that explores how four great democratic statesmen—Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion—worked with the military leaders who served them during warfare. The relationship between military leaders and political leaders has always been a complicated one, especially in times of war. When the chips are down, who should run the show—the politicians or the generals? In Supreme Command, Eliot A. Cohen expertly argues that great statesmen do not turn their wars over to their generals, and then stay out of their way. Great statesmen make better generals of their generals. They question and drive their military men, and at key times they overrule their advice. The generals may think they know how to win, but the statesmen are the ones who see the big picture. Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion led four very different kinds of democracy, under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. They came from four very different backgrounds—backwoods lawyer, dueling French doctor, rogue aristocrat, and impoverished Jewish socialist. Yet they faced similar challenges. Each exhibited mastery of detail and fascination with technology. All four were great learners, who studied war as if it were their own profession, and in many ways mastered it as well as did their generals. All found themselves locked in conflict with military men. All four triumphed. The powerful lessons of this “brilliant” (National Review) book will touch and inspire anyone who faces intense adversity and is the perfect gift for history buffs of all backgrounds.
Why do competent armies fail? Eliot Cohen and John Gooch explore answers to this question throughout this extensive analysis of unsuccessful military operations. Since it was first published in 1990, Military Misfortunes has become the classic analysis of the unexpected catastrophes that befall competent militaries. Now with a new Afterword discussing America's missteps in Iraq, Somalia, and the War on Terror, Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch's gripping battlefield narratives and groundbreaking explanations of the hidden factors that undermine armies are brought thoroughly up to date. As recent events prove, Military Misfortunes will be required reading for as long as armies go to war.
What Shakespeare’s plays can teach us about modern-day politics William Shakespeare understood power: what it is, how it works, how it is gained, and how it is lost. In The Hollow Crown, Eliot A. Cohen reveals how the battling princes of Henry IV and scheming senators of Julius Caesar can teach us to better understand power and politics today. The White House, after all, is a court—with intrigue and conflict rivaling those on the Globe’s stage—as is an army, a business, or a university. And each court is full of driven characters, in all their ambition, cruelty, and humanity. Henry V’s inspiring speeches reframe John F. Kennedy’s appeal, Richard III’s wantonness illuminates Vladimir Putin’s brutality, and The Tempest’s grace offers a window into the presidency of George Washington. An original and incisive perspective, The Hollow Crown shows how Shakespeare’s works transform our understanding of the leaders who, for good or ill, make and rule our world.
Ted Cohen was an original and captivating essayist known for his inquisitive intelligence, wit, charm, and a deeply humane feel for life. For Cohen, writing was a way of discovering, and also celebrating, the depth and complexity of things overlooked by most professional philosophers and aestheticians—but not by most people. Whether writing about the rules of baseball, of driving, or of Kant’s Third Critique; about Hitchcock, ceramics, or jokes, Cohen proved that if you study the world with a bemused but honest attentiveness, you can find something to philosophize about more or less anywhere. This collection, edited and introduced by philosopher Daniel Herwitz, brings together some of Cohen’s best work to capture the unique style that made Cohen one of the most beloved philosophers of his generation. Among the perceptive, engaging, and laugh-out-loud funny reflections on movies, sports, art, language, and life included here are Cohen’s classic papers on metaphor and his Pushcart Prize–winning essay on baseball, as well as memoir, fiction, and even poetry. Full of free-spirited inventiveness, these Serious Larks would be equally at home outside Thoreau’s cabin on the waters of Walden Pond as they are here, proving that intelligence, sensitivity, and good humor can be found in philosophical writing after all.
Throughout the ages, great thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, and many others have had incredibly useful things to say about overcoming the strife of everyday living and attaining happiness. Unfortunately contemporary approaches to psychology have made only limited use of this guidance. At last, here is an uplifting psychology that systematically applies the wisdom of the ages to attaining life pregnant with insight, meaning, value, and purpose. Guided by the vision of great minds, this book shows you how you can still feel secure and hopeful in a precarious, uncertain universe; face evil with life-affirming courage; build self-esteem, respect for others, and global reverence; become your own person; take control of you're emotions and behavior; strengthen your willpower; confront moral problems creatively; build rapport and solidarity with others; and hone your practical decision-making skills. Unlike classical approaches to rational psychology that only scratch the surface of what's deeply wrong in your life, The New Rational Therapy gets to the core and offers you penetrating, philosophical antidotes for transcending your malaise, and for attaining an enduring, profound happiness
Leonard Cohen wrote the poems in Book of Longing—his first book of poetry in more than twenty years—during his five-year stay at a Zen monastery on Southern California's Mount Baldy, and in Los Angeles, Montreal, and Mumbai. This dazzling collection is enhanced by the author's playful and provocative drawings, which interact in exciting, unexpected ways on the page with poetry that is timeless, meditative, and often darkly humorous. An international sensation, Book of Longing contains all the elements that have brought Cohen's artistry with language worldwide recognition.
The enhanced The Lyrics of Leonard Cohen is a four decade-spanning collection, containing the lyrics of Suzanne, Hallelujah, So Long, Marianne, Everybody Knows, Famous Blue Raincoat and many more, including songs written but never recorded by Cohen himself. Blackly comic, tender, and polished until they shone like diamonds, Cohen’s lyrics were unmistakable. This Omnibus Enhanced edition includes curated Spotify playlists for each song in this collection, showcasing both the recorded works of Leonard Cohen and a selection of the many interpretations and reimaginings of his songs. Additionally, alongside an exclusive tribute to the man, there is also an interactive timeline of his life, complete with rare videos and images of life performances, book extracts and more. Cohen was an accomplished novelist and poet before releasing his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen. His music documented the tender yearnings and salved the heartbreaks of romantics around the world for six decades. The Lyrics of Leonard Cohen is an examination of the literary influence of the master wordsmith and a dazzling display of the work of one of our most passionate musical artists. Rediscover his genius in with this celebratory volume.
This selection of poems by Leonard Cohen, one of the most acclaimed singer-songwriters in the world, is accompanied by twenty-four of his striking and provocative drawings. Cohen first made his name as a poet more than half a century ago and since then his achievements in poetry and music have made him an internationally revered figure. These fifteen poems, including “Death of a Lady’s Man,” “On Hearing a Name Long Unspoken,” and “The Embrace,” are drawn from across his remarkable career and appear here for the first time with his illustrations. With its lyrical intensity and sensual immediacy, Fifteen Poems offers a potent distillation of the genre-crossing genius of one of the most admired artists of our time.
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER Named a Fall Read by Vogue, Esquire, The Washington Post, TIME, Vanity Fair and O, the Oprah Magazine. One of Daily Mail and Financial Times's Best Books of 2018. “There are very, very few people who occupy the ground that Leonard Cohen walks on.” —BONO The Flame is the final work from Leonard Cohen, the revered poet and musician whose fans span generations and whose work is celebrated throughout the world. Featuring poems, excerpts from his private notebooks, lyrics, and hand-drawn self-portraits, The Flame offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist. A reckoning with a life lived deeply and passionately, with wit and panache, The Flame is a valedictory work. “This volume contains my father’s final efforts as a poet,” writes Cohen’s son, Adam Cohen, in his foreword. “It was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end.” Leonard Cohen died in late 2016. But “each page of paper that he blackened,” in the words of his son, “was lasting evidence of a burning soul.”
A thought-provoking journey inside the minds of the world’s most accomplished storytellers, from Shakespeare to Stephen King NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SPECTATOR • “Richard Cohen’s book acted as a tonic to me. It didn’t make me more Russian, but it fired up my imagination. I have never annotated a book so fiercely.”—Hilary Mantel “There are three rules for writing a novel,” Somerset Maugham is said to have said. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” How then to bring characters to life, find a voice, kill your darlings, or run that most challenging of literary gauntlets, writing a sex scene? What made Nabokov choose the name Lolita? Why did Fitzgerald use firstperson narration in The Great Gatsby ? How did Kerouac, who raged against revision, finally come to revise On the Road ? Veteran editor and author Richard Cohen takes us on an engrossing journey into the lives and minds of the world’s greatest writers, from Honoré de Balzac and George Eliot to Virginia Woolf and Zadie Smith—with a few mischievous detours to visit Tolstoy along the way. In a scintillating tour d’horizon, Cohen lays bare the tricks, motivations, and techniques of the literary greats, revealing their obsessions and flaws and how we can learn from them along the way.
Every April the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute hosts its Annual Strategy Conference. This year's theme, "Strategy During the Lean Years: Learning From the Past and the Present," brought together scholars, serving and retired military officers, and civilian defense officials from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom to discuss strategy formulation in time of penury from Tacitus to Force XII. In this time of declining defense budgets, the Army and the other services are coping with the dual challenges of downsizing while remaining the world's foremost military. Today, the armed forces are 35 percent smaller than they were only five years ago. Amid the uncertainty of the build-down, the Army faces what is both a challenge and an opportunity: how to make the very fine Army which won a decisive victory in Desert Storm even better while it changes its size and structure. In this paper, Professor Eliot A. Cohen of Johns Hopkins University urges the Army to draw on lessons from its own history. More than one generation of American military professionals have inherited and perpetuated Civil War Major General Emory Upton's distrust of–and disdain for–civilians in general and politically elected or appointed civilian leaders in particular. As Professor Cohen indicates, the uncertainties of downsizing and reorganization coincide with the need to accommodate new technologies that could help the Army cope with the diverse threats that are part of what is still a very dangerous world. He cautions that in coping with this enormous challenge, the Army must be careful not to engage in the kind of introspection that may foster an institutionalized isolation from the nation it is sworn to defend. Professor Cohen suggests there are ways to keep America's Army truly the Army of the nation and its people. The way soldiers and leaders are recruited, trained, educated, and promoted must, he asserts, change to bring more and not less civilian influence into the Army. Professor Cohen urges the Army to go forward into Force XXI and to do so with both enhanced technologies and with an enhanced understanding of who and what it serves: the American people and the defense of their Constitution. The future is uncertain, and we will be better prepared to meet the challenges of that future if we are willing to engage ideas in an open and informed debate. To that end, the Strategic Studies Institute offers Dr. Cohen's perspective for your consideration.
“A treasure trove for Leonard Cohen fans—the dazzling, wide-ranging collection of interviews that Jeff Burger has unearthed not only offers the songwriter’s story in his own words but reveals that Cohen’s language in conversation can be every bit as magnificent as his lyrics.” —Alan Light, author of The Holy or the Broken This book collects more than fifty interviews with Leonard Cohen, one of the most admired performers of the last half century, conducted worldwide between 1966 and 2012, and also includes a foreword by singer Suzanne Vega and eight pages of rarely seen photos. In it, the artist talks about “Bird on the Wire,” “Hallelujah,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” and his other classic songs. He candidly discusses his famous romances, his years in a Zen monastery, his ill-fated collaboration with producer Phil Spector, and his long battle with depression. He also comments on his sometimes controversial poetry and novels, the financial crisis that nearly wiped out his savings, and his remarkable late-career resurgence. Here you’ll find interviews that first appeared in the New York Times and Rolling Stone, but also conversations that have not previously been printed in English, as well as many illuminating reminiscences that contributors supplied specifically for this definitive anthology. Jeff Burger is the editor of Springsteen on Springsteen. He has contributed to Barron’s, Family Circle, GQ, the Los Angeles Times, Reader’s Digest, and more than seventy-five other magazines, newspapers, and books. He lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey.
Every April the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute hosts its Annual Strategy Conference. This year's theme, "Strategy During the Lean Years: Learning From the Past and the Present," brought together scholars, serving and retired military officers, and civilian defense officials from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom to discuss strategy formulation in time of penury from Tacitus to Force XII. In this time of declining defense budgets, the Army and the other services are coping with the dual challenges of downsizing while remaining the world's foremost military. Today, the armed forces are 35 percent smaller than they were only five years ago. Amid the uncertainty of the build-down, the Army faces what is both a challenge and an opportunity: how to make the very fine Army which won a decisive victory in Desert Storm even better while it changes its size and structure. In this paper, Professor Eliot A. Cohen of Johns Hopkins University urges the Army to draw on lessons from its own history. More than one generation of American military professionals have inherited and perpetuated Civil War Major General Emory Upton's distrust of-and disdain for-civilians in general and politically elected or appointed civilian leaders in particular. As Professor Cohen indicates, the uncertainties of downsizing and reorganization coincide with the need to accommodate new technologies that could help the Army cope with the diverse threats that are part of what is still a very dangerous world. He cautions that in coping with this enormous challenge, the Army must be careful not to engage in the kind of introspection that may foster an institutionalized isolation from the nation it is sworn to defend. Professor Cohen suggests there are ways to keep America's Army truly the Army of the nation and its people. The way soldiers and leaders are recruited, trained, educated, and promoted must, he asserts, change to bring more and not less civilian influence into the Army. Professor Cohen urges the Army to go forward into Force XXI and to do so with both enhanced technologies and with an enhanced understanding of who and what it serves: the American people and the defense of their Constitution. The future is uncertain, and we will be better prepared to meet the challenges of that future if we are willing to engage ideas in an open and informed debate. To that end, the Strategic Studies Institute offers Dr. Cohen's perspective for your consideration.
To mark the publication of Leonard Cohen's final book, The Flame, McClelland & Stewart is proud to reissue six beautiful editions of Cohen's cherished early works of poetry. A freshly packaged series for devoted Leonard Cohen fans and those who wish to discover one of the world's most adored and celebrated writers. Originally published by McClelland & Stewart in 1966, Parasites of Heaven came in the wake of the success of Cohen's second novel, Beautiful Losers. While not as ambitious as his three previous collections, Parasites of Heaven is an essential document in Cohen's evolution as it contains poems that would go on to form the basis of some of his most beloved songs, including "Suzanne" and "Avalanche.
A father explores his son’s autism, and delivers a hopeful message. A Perfect World is a unique international survey, drawing on scores of lengthy interviews conducted over four years, as well as being a moving family memoir. It offers new insights on the diagnosis of autism, intervention therapy, research and special-needs learning. It is a story that will appeal to parents, teachers, community workers, health specialists and fans of travel writing alike. "With remarkable erudition and literary elegance, David Cohen, the father of an autistic boy named Eliot, has crafted an extraordinary account of autism in his own family, and in the world. In this engaging and honest book, Cohen shows autism in all its vicissitudes in England, New Zealand, Korea, the US and Israel. A gifted writer, Cohen moves so gracefully across narratives, scientific discourses, artistic genres, historical periods and continents that you hardly notice the full force of his prose until the conclusion when, suddenly, it hits you: Cohen has made us see autism as an essential part of the human condition." Professor Roy Richard Grinker, author of Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism, Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University, USA
NATIONAL BESTSELLER An unprecedented glimpse into the formation of the legendary talent of Leonard Cohen. Before the celebrated late-career world tours, before the Grammy awards, before the chart-topping albums, before “Hallelujah” and “So Long, Marianne” and “Famous Blue Raincoat,” the young Leonard Cohen wrote poetry and fiction and yearned for literary stardom. In A Ballet of Lepers, readers will discover that the magic that animated Cohen’s unforgettable body of work was present from the very beginning. Written between 1956 in Montreal, just as Cohen was publishing his first poetry collection, and 1961, when he’d settled on Greece’s Hydra island, the pieces in this collection offer startling insight into Cohen’s imagination and creative process, and explore themes that would permeate his later work, from shame and unworthiness to sexual desire to longing, whether for love, family, freedom, or transcendence. The titular novel, A Ballet of Lepers—one he later remarked was “probably a better novel” than his celebrated book The Favourite Game—is a haunting examination of these elements, while the fifteen stories, as well as the playscript, probe the inner demons of his characters, many of whom could function as stand-ins for the author himself. Meditative, surprising, playful, and provocative, A Ballet of Lepers is vivid in its detail, unsparing in its gaze, and reveals the great artist and visceral genius like never before.
The final work from Leonard Cohen, Canada's most celebrated poet and an artist whose audience spans generations and whose work is known and loved throughout the world. The Flame is a stunning collection of Leonard Cohen's last poems, selected and ordered by the author in the final months of his life. Featuring lyrics, prose pieces, and illustrations, the book also contains an extensive selection from Cohen's notebooks, which he kept in poetic form throughout his life, and offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist and thinker. An enormously powerful final chapter in Cohen's storied literary career, The Flame showcases the full range of Leonard Cohen's lyricism, from the exquisitely transcendent to the darkly funny. By turns devastatingly sad and winningly strange, these are the works of a poet and lyricist who set out to explore our darkest questions and came back wanting, yearning for more.
In this essay collection, Michael Cohen tells us about his surprise encounter with the remains of Frida Kahlo, about his father’s murder, and about his son’s close shave with death on the highway. His subjects can be as commonplace as golfing with close friends, amateur astronomy, birding, or learning to fly at the age of sixty. But he asks difficult questions about how we are grounded in space and time, how we are affected by our names, how a healthy person can turn into a hypochondriac, and how we might commune with the dead. And throughout he measures, compares and interprets his experiences through the lens of six decades of reading. The tools of the writer’s trade fascinate him as do eateries in his small college town, male dress habits, American roads, and roadside shrines. He lives on the Blood River in Kentucky when he is not in the Tucson Mountains.
For the past two decades Matt Cohen has been one of Canada's premier writers of fiction, with an impressive list of critically acclaimed and award-winning novels and stories. Lives of the Mind Slaves- composed of eight stories and a novella, all but one of which were previously published - is an excellent sampler of his literary sophistication and craftsmanship. This obviously carefully selected collection, emphasizing the author's conventional rather than experimental production, exhibits the finely tuned and engaging intelligence we have come to expect in Cohen's fiction, an intelligence that relentlessly probes and exposes the depths of an urbanized, cosmopolitan, transcultural, and permanently uprooted individual who perceives the mind as his last refuge from life's randomness, instability, and impermanence.
Few would have predicted that Bernard Berenson, from a poor Lithuanian Jewish immigrant family, would rise above poverty. Yet Berenson left his crowded home near Boston's railyards and transformed himself into the world's most renowned expert on Italian Renaissance paintings, the owner of a beautiful villa and an immense private library in the hills outside Florence. The explosion of the Gilded Age art market and Berenson's work for dealer Joseph Duveen supported a luxurious life, but it came with painful costs: Berenson hid his origins and, though his attributions remain foundational, felt that he had betrayed his gifts as a critic and interpreter of paintings. This finely drawn portrait of Berenson, the first biography devoted to him in a quarter century, draws on new archival materials that bring out the significance of his secret business dealings and the central importance of several women in his life and work: his sister Senda Berenson; his wife Mary Berenson; his patron Isabella Stewart Gardner; his lover Belle da Costa Greene; his dear friend Edith Wharton, and the companion of his last forty years, Nicky Mariano. Rachel Cohen explores Berenson's inner world and extraordinary visual capacity while also illuminating the historical forces-new capital, the developing art market, persistent anti-Semitism, and the two world wars-that profoundly affected his life"--
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