Cohen’s subjects inΒ A Place to ReadΒ 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 writerβs 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.
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When we call someone βbookish,β weβre usually thinking of the classic bookworm who encloses himself in a world separate from everyday life. I always think of that classic episode of βThe Twilight Zone,β where Burgess Meredith wants nothing more out of life than the solitude he needs to read books in the library. (Iβm sure you all remember the ironic ending.)
Michael Cohen is bookish in a different way. For him books are an extension of an active life, the means to connect his own environment and experiences to the world at large, the one we all live in. The need to connect and what we learn about the world and ourselves when we do is the theme of these fascinating explorations.
You might say that the βtopicβ of a Cohen essay doesnβt really matter all that much. It can be serious (capital punishment) or trivial (local restaurants). Cohen begins his essay βMen in Uniformβ by describing his own attitude toward the clothing he wears. As a βtypical maleβ he is largely indifferent. You might say at this point, βWho cares what this guy wearsβ? But thatβs the whole point: the everyday decision is just the beginning of the inquiry. The stimulus is a book (something about ladiesβ black dresses) which Cohen vividly recalls reading. And then weβre off, on a journey through the fascinating, surprising, often funny world of menβs clothing. As Cohen tells us. βone of the governing principles of male sartorial design is making inappropriate choices hard to blunder into.β Along the way we get all kinds of wonderful information: Tobacco tycoon P. J. Lorillard, imitating the Prince of Wales, brings the tuxedo to America. The menβs suit evolves from a display of the male body to concealment of it. The rise and fall (and rise and fall) of the double-breasted suit, etc. Finally we return to Michael Cohen and his clothing choices. But itβs not really about him any more. It never is, and thatβs really the point.
Sometimes Cohenβs topics are obviously serious. His brilliant essay on capital punishment (βThe Victims and the Furiesβ) couldnβt be more different from the usual βpro/conβ essay. It doesnβt particularly matter whether you agree or disagree with Cohenβs position. (Why be coy? Heβs against it.) Either way you will be dazzled by his fascinating arguments and the wide range of his references, from Orestes killing his mother in the Oresteia of Aeschylus to Michael Dukakis fumbling his answer to a question on CNN.
And sometimes we just get a little fun, as in his essay on the demographics of local restaurants and the pleasures of a round of his beloved game of golf.
We learn a lot about Michael Cohen from his essays. But we learn much more about the world we all live in. The final message of these informative and entertaining essays: Each of us is alone. But weβre all in this together.
β Richard Steiger, Amazon verified review
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Michael Cohenβs 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 lifeβs worth of thoughtful rumination on time, love, travel, and family, as well as what it means to be, almost existentially, a reader.
β Christina Thompson, Editor, Harvard Review
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Anyone who has pounded the pavement selling The Great Books of the Western World in 54 volumes and lived to tell gets my undying respect and should get yours. Michael Cohen is a book rat, not a book snob. For him, the pleasures of the book are tactile and auditory as well as psychological and philosophical. The essays in A Place to Read take on potential plate-lunch combinations in western Kentucky, the tuxedo as male uniform, the golf course as locus of friendship and humor, and Baptist theological responses to Day of the Dead practices in MichoacΓ‘n, in addition to more strictly literary subjects.
β Ann Neelon, editor of New Madrid
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I donβt know if Michael Cohen drinks Dos Equis, but if and when he does, he may qualify as one of the most interesting men in the world. Cohen is a retired English professor, amateur astronomer, small plane pilot, long time birder, golfer, world traveler, and author. He has dealt with family tragedy and daunting health issues, spent seven months leisurely reading three-thousand pages of French novelist Marcel Proust, and dined with two future Apollo astronauts. But above all he is a reader and lover of books, and therein lies the central theme of A Place to Read: Life and Books. Cohen is a keen observer who writes clearly and candidly about his experiences and at the same time he is an avid reader who does not shy away from the deeper thoughts of authors such as essayist Michel de Montaigne or E. B. White. His passion for books is evident throughout this fascinating collection of essays and I heartily recommend Cohenβs book to any self-confessed bibliophile. After reading A Place to Read, I am reminded of a passage in Annie Dillardβs book The Writing Life: βThere is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent readingβthat is a good life.β
β Bob Vickers, Amazon verified review
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There are books about books and even books about readers, but there are few books about reading. Michael Cohen has filled that void wonderfully, with a book of essays that in one way or another, tell about a life of reading.
Cohenβs life as essayist, professor, and keen observer of ordinary things and people are the substance of these essays, but in one way or another, each brings the reader back to the special joys of a life of loving books and reading. Each in its own way comments on the human situation, filtered through a personal optic that is at once refined and erudite. And yet, there is nothing stilted about these essays.
Every reader will come away with favorite essays from this collection β three stood out for me, mainly because they touched a personal nerve or two. What I liked most about the essays in general was how Michael Cohen artfully β or maybe just naturally β integrates life with books and books with life. Everywhere, for him, there is the synapse between experience and books read.
Michael Cohen has given us a collection of personal retrospectives that deserve a place in the finest tradition of the American essay. They are simple and directβamusing, highly personal, and insightful. Theyβll make you smile, smirk, frown, and gasp, but theyβll never bore. I promise.
β E. A. Allen, author of the Montclaire Mysteries
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The act of reading is one thing, but to really love reading means sharing with others the gifts and flaws that admired writers have delivered to us across time and place. It is to interpret those writersβ attempts βto describe what is indescribable,β as E.B. White once put it, and remind us of what those writers reveal about the world and ourselves. That is the promise Michael Cohen makes to readers of his essays in A Place to Read.
Cohen, a retired literature professor, neatly ties together his personal essays with ribbons of pithy wisdom from writers he describes with familiarity and reverence, like beloved aunts and uncles he hasnβt seen in years. When summarizing the effect Proust and Montaigne had on him in the frankly-named essay, βA Retiree Reads Proust and Montaigne,β he explains, βboth these writers provided me with what I was after: some self-indulgence and a good dose of the subjective.
It doesnβt matter how many of the authors a reader has met before; Cohen will introduce you to them anew. In fact, A Place to Read is most fun when the reader tries to keep up with Cohenβs literary associations. The author is in his element when linking Hamlet to the features of Moleskine notebooks by way of James Joyce and Oliver Wendell Holmesβ writing processes as in the essay, βNotebooks.β Or, in one of his strongest narratives, Cohen constructs a vision of Mexico starting with his 1965 spring break visit to a NASA tracking station in Guaymas as Gemini 3 circled the Earth. Then he somehow ends with discovering Frida Kahloβs ashes, while along the way conjuring Mary McCarthy, Alain de Botton and Susan Sontag as if they were Mexicoβs scenic lookouts, crammed megacities or rugged canyons.
In embracing this professorial voice, Cohen becomes a confident and unapologetic scholarly tour guide, showing the reader around the seemingly random but intensely personal places of his life. To your left is the Barrancas del Cobre in Mexico. Straight ahead youβll see a roadside memorial outside Tucson. Here are the bookshelves being emptied as formerly treasured books are being sold off.
And often the places he shows us represent more than just backdrops or settings. Place bolsters the understanding of his life at particular stages and tethers him to specific states of mind. Place, then, is a metaphysical concept that streams through the essays. βI am located when I am in one of these places,β he writes of his dual homes in Tucson, Arizona, and on the Blood River in western Kentucky.
In the title essay, Cohen invites readers to question the relationship between space and the act of absorbing what books offer us:
When I think about the power of reading to transform place and the way real readers read anywhere, I canβt help but have mixed feelings about the idea of βreading rooms,β places designed specifically for reading.
Cohen does stumble in the essay βMen in Uniformβ when he uses outdated generalizations, presumably to amuse. Instead, they seem to jolt the reader out of the informative and thought-provoking place to read that Cohen has constructed.
Cohen begins that essay, βOne of the many reasons I am glad to be maleβright up there with never having to deal with menstruation and usually being able to get my carry-on out of the overhead compartment by myselfβis the clothes.β
Later in βMen in Uniform,β Cohen describes the sentiments in Ilene Beckermanβs Love, Loss, and What I Wore, as βunthinkable except perhaps for gay men: straight men do not ordinarily associate their affective lives with their clothes or shoes.β
But Cohen, as any good essayist, is inviting us into his mind, his experience, his particular shade of glasses through which this retired professor, amateur pilot, compulsive reader, happy golfer, proud father, eager traveler and shrewd observer views the world.
In doing so, Cohen spends as much effort prompting readers to think about life as he does showing how great literature can inform us about the joys of flying or comprehending death or about the construction pens and the nature of names. Cohen wrestles with existential questions that confound us all without straining for answers that he doesnβt have:
β¦ in fact the impatient skywatcher sees little of what the heavens offer. One cannot even begin to see dim objects until the eyes are dark-adapted, so the first twenty to thirty minutes under the stars have to be indirect gestures toward seeing.
At his best, Cohen treats the essays like indirect gestures toward understanding life. And thatβs worth finding a place to read.
β Ryan Alessi, New Madrid