A Place to Read: Life and Books

In this essay collection, Michael Cohen tells us about his surprise encounter with the remains of Frida Kahlo, about his fathers murder, and about his sons 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 writers 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. Michael Cohens essays on the reading life are a treat to read. Relaxed, personal, wide-ranging, they contain fascinating nuggets of information and lively assessments of hundreds of books, as well as a whole lifes worth of thoughtful rumination on time, love, travel, and family, as well as what it means to be, almost existentially, a reader. - Christina Thompson, Editor, Harvard Review