Rich Cohen

Despite my assurances to myself that I would be better about keeping to my self-imposed schedule for blog posts, I’ve not had the best start to 2021. However! I’m doing what I always wanted to keep up with – review a book the Sunday BEFORE it comes out! And, oddly enough, this hockey book is arriving the day before the truncated NHL season starts – what timing!

While I didn’t love the first book of Rich’s I read (The Last Pirate of New York), I DID enjoy his writing style. When I show more discovered he was writing a hockey book, I was thrilled. As a childhood skater and athlete, as well as lover of all thing sociology and children’s psychology (it’s the teacher/historian in me, I cannot help it), I was really excited to read about the subculture that is children’s sports leagues. My observations first started when I was dragged to attended my sister’s soccer games. Laura, who I’m still not sure enjoyed the sport, was frequently a defender and occasionally a goalie in the early days of her young soccer career, and the coach’s daughter was always the star forward. Whether or not she could actually kick the ball.

Children’s sports are weird. There was a whole group of us who were the older siblings of the players who all more or less knew each other. We’d pal around while our parents, who clearly didn’t really like each other, made polite small talk and did lots of subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) bragging about how great their child played in last week’s game. Suddenly parents who didn’t know a soccer ball from a football (or that soccer is called football everywhere else in the world), were all of a sudden experts and yelled at the coach to tell the other players to give their child the ball, even if their child was the goalie. Didn’t matter, their kid was most important and therefore should get all the action.

My childhood hockey playing took place on our lake. I loved skating outside, though would occasionally skate indoors but only once global warming prevented our Pennsylvania lake from freezing anymore. We didn’t have any leagues where I grew up so I had to find other outlets for my hockey obsession – I played lots of floor hockey and street hockey, and hallway hockey (an invention of our dorm at Pitt). And I was always a goalie. Because I couldn’t skate that well. And was clumsy, and fell over a bit. Well, a lot when I was little – but I could catch just about anything. My love of the sport was entrenched from a young age, as was the culture. I loved goalie fights (I even instigated one once), hat tricks, and my Hershey Bears (one of the oldest teams in the US). My biggest complaint and childhood regret, one I still complain about today, was the fact that I didn’t get to play in a league with other girls like Laura did with soccer.

So now, I get to live vicariously through Rich and his son, but through the lens closer to Rich’s than his twelve year old son’s. I’ve already been tapped by my friends with children to be their kids hockey aunt at games when they get older, so I decided to read up on what my faux-parental obligations at a game might entail. Rich is an entertaining writer, and while he’s written so many books about historical events and people, I think it is here, as a quasi-memoir/pee wees-expose, that he truly shines.

His humor is spot on, and his ability to satirize and poke fun at himself and other hockey parents along the way is tremendously entertaining. It transcends just the pee wee hockey community, but is the perfect book for all parents of child athletes (it’s a great give for the parents this spring!) as well as for recovering child athletes who got fed up with their parents living vicariously through them.

Pee Wees is a brilliant addition to the (albeit slim) pantheon of great ice hockey books. I know it’s a bit niche, but there are some amazing hockey books out there and I’m so excited to be able to recommend yet another. show less

Rich Cohen is one of my favorite authors (of my generation we are nearly the same age). Like Cohen I grew up saturated with 1960s culture but feeling as though born too late and missed the party. Cohen was a lifelong Stones fanatic who in the early 1990s just out of college landed the dream job of working for Rolling Stone (the magazine) and given the assignment to embed with the band on tour and write a series of articles, which are the basis for the book. Turns out the band really liked show more Cohen and he has worked with them on other projects in years beyond. So he brings personal experience as well as his remarkable writing and insights. However most of the book is a history of the band in the 1960s during their heyday which is exactly what I wanted to know more about. A review in the SF Chronicle called it one the best books about the Stones (the others Stanley Booth’s The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones and Robert Greenfield’s S.T.P.: A Journey Through America With the Rolling Stones). I learned something interesting on nearly every page and often it transcended the Stones into a bigger tapestry of the 1960s, an era I once pined for and now better understand for better and worse. show less

Written in the midst of the concussion crisis in Football--which 1985 Bears great Duerson's suicide in many ways kicked off--this is a serious and superbly fun memoir, meditation, and biography of a sport, a team, and an era. I wish I could recommend this book more highly, but five stars is all that I'm allowed. From Jim Thorpe and George Halas to Mike Ditka and Walter Payton to Jim McMahon and William "the Refrigerator" Perry, this book traces the entire sport through the apogee of the 1985 show more Bears, a team still widely considered to be the best team to ever play professional football. None of the pieces would ever really work the same way again, and many would be destroyed or undermined by the very season that gave them everlasting glory. This is one of the top two or three sports books I've ever come across. Can't recommend it any more than I already have! show less

When the Game Was War: The NBA's Greatest Season, by Rich Cohen, makes a compelling case for 1987 being the best season. I don't believe there is a single season that is "the best," too many variables and ways to define it, but 1987 was certainly one of the best. And Cohen convincingly shows why.

The mix of established stars and ones on the way up, teams at the beginning or end of dynasties, there is a lot to love about the 1987 season. As the title suggests, this was when hard fouls were show more common, players played through injury far more often, and what we called basketbrawl where I grew up was not an uncommon feature of the pro game. While many of us who loved basketball during this era miss those elements, it is probably better for the players' long term health that some of these features have been curtailed. But man were those some awesome games!

Since my interest wasn't in whether I agreed that this was the greatest season (I don't believe there is a single season that can hold that distinction) but in learning why this should be considered as among the greatest, I came to the book largely for the nostalgia. By 1987 I had been following the NBA fairly closely for about 20 years, so while I hadn't placed every memory into their correct year I certainly remember the events covered here. If you happen to believe in a "greatest season," this may well convince you, I definitely came away with a better appreciation.

For those who remember the season, this will be a fun trip down memory lane. For those for whom many of these names are stars of the past, you may come away with both a better appreciation for what came before as well as a better understanding of how today's game built on the foundation these players laid.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less