A Place to Read: Life and Books. This item is unavailable.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 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.

Since his retirement from university teaching, Michael Cohen has been writing personal essays about his family, about lifelong pursuits such as golf and birding, about newer interests in flying and amateur astronomy, and above all about six decades of reading. His essays – collected here in A Place to Read – have appeared in Harvard Review, Birding, The Humanist, The Missouri Review, and The Kenyon Review. He is the author of five books, including an introductory poetry text, The Poem in Question (Harcourt Brace, 1983) and an award-winning book on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Georgia, 1989).  Michael Cohen lives in Murray, Kentucky, and Tucson, Arizona.