A Place to Read: Life and Books

243 Pages. The author has signed five a inked-line inscription on the front endpaper and also a signature only on the title page. Beyond that is a new book with no other defects noted. The interior text pages are bright, tight, and white. In this essay collection of 22, 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. Contents in 22 Essays: Location Location Location, Names, A Place to Read, Meat and 3 Veg, My Hypochondria, Men in Uniform, The Victims and the Furies, Seeing Mexico, Communing with the Dead, A Dream of Learning, Notebooks, A Fountain Pen of Good Repute, Flying Lessons, Selling My Library, Watching Birds and Stars, A Round with Friends, The Place Where It Happened, A Retiree Reads Proust and Montaigne, On Not Being E. B. White, On the Road Again, The King in Winter, and My Next Read. …