Cohn Head

In Cohn-Head, one of America's most successful female anchors lays bare her hard-fought rise to the top of the sportscasting boys' club and her life inside the ESPN empire, talks candidly about sports personalities she has met, and reveals her personal top ten lists plus much, much more.

No one so famous or controversial led so many secret lives. Loathed by some, and well respected by others, Roy Cohn was known as the toughest and most brilliant lawyer in America. From his role in the Rosenberg trial and as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy through his extraordinary friendship with J. Edgar Hoover and his vendetta against Robert Kennedy, Cohn's reputation grew larger than life. Presidents, celebrities, gangsters, judges, and endless politicians crossed Cohn’s path, either as friend or foe, including J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Ronald Reagan, Robert Kennedy, Barbara Walters, Fat Tony Salerno, Louis Nizer, Si Newhouse, Rupert Murdoch, George Steinbrenner, Donald Trump, and many more. Cohn was the target of numerous indictments and haunted by professional misconduct charges which led to his disbarment shortly before his death. His private life, even more outrageous than his life known to the public, constantly had his name in gossip columns; there were his lovers, his denial of his homosexuality and AIDS diagnosis, and finally his death from AIDS-related cancer in 1986. Nicolas von Hoffman has created a remarkable and provocative biography of a complex life that was driven by power. Interviewing family members, colleagues, clients, friends, and lovers, he gives an extraordinary portrait of the man, his ideological passion, and the patterns of power and money that made him, in the end, one of the most influential men in our society. From hidden bank accounts, numerous incidents of political fixing, and surprising connections, Citizen Cohn reveals the real Roy Cohn.

Jacob Fine believes in God. He believes that every soul that comes into this world is preordained with an individual symmetry or pattern that he or she will go through life with. Choices that are made during one’s lifetime, for good or evil, have been preordained as well. Lucky or unlucky, wealth or poverty, happiness or sadness, health or sickness, marriage, children, and all the stages of life that one goes through have been written already, as the saying goes. His mother gave birth to him in 1926, a screaming eight pounder. His father knew immediately that his son would make a mark in this world. Jacob was brought up in a secular Jewish household. The family would observe the major holidays rather informally. Jacob went through the usual Bar Mitzvah ritual. He had no siblings, and the family enjoyed a nice, comfortable life in a middle-class suburb of Chicago. Jacob went to law school. He was brilliant, was brash, had political ambitions, and graduated with honors, and he immediately started practicing his profession in a medium-sized law firm. On a Monday morning in the late 1950s, he received a subpoena, and what followed would help define his impending career. He stared at the order as waves of excitement and anticipation consumed him. He was ordered to appear before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, DC, on Thursday morning. He smiled and then remembered that it was written, just as he was taught to believe.

A provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who were the moving forces behind the creation of America's motion picture industry. The names Harry Cohn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, and Adolph Zucker are giants in the history of contemporary Hollywood, outsiders who dared to invent their own vision of the American Dream. Even to this day, the American values defined largely by the movies of these émigrés endure in American cinema and culture. Who these men were, how they came to dominate Hollywood, and what they gained and lost in the process is the exhilarating story of An Empire of Their Own.