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American Scoundrel

Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump

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American Scoundrel

De: Kai Bird, Susan Goldmark
Narrado por: Ari Fliakos
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Compra ahora por 18,87 €

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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus, inspiration for the Oscar-winning sensation Oppenheimer, a biography of Roy Cohn – arguably the mastermind behind the current arc of American political life, including the ascent of Donald Trump.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, the many dramas of American political life had one common denominator: Roy Cohn. In his twenties, the infamous young prosecutor sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair and burned 30,000 books by ‘communist’ authors, becoming the baby-faced symbol of McCarthyism. By his thirties, Cohn, with a red scar that ran down his nose from a botched childhood operation, was known in New York City as the Mafia’s hired legal gun. In his forties, he partied with the glitterati at Studio 54 and became friends with Richard Nixon. In his fifties, Cohn was invited to Reagan’s Oval Office. Nancy Reagan called Cohn often for advice and gossip – indeed, Cohn had an almost insatiable interest in gossip, and much of his influence over the years derived from his transactional relationship with gossip columnists. Perhaps most significantly, he mentored the young Donald Trump. The real estate developer, whom Cohn called his ‘best friend’, phoned him a dozen times a day.

Cohn considered himself the one lawyer in town who could always escape the consequences. Indicted by the Feds on three occasions for bribery, perjury, extortion and other white-collar crimes, he was acquitted every time. To achieve his ends, he did whatever it took. ‘If you need somebody to get vicious’, Trump once said, ‘hire Roy Cohn.’

Years after his death of AIDS in 1986, Cohn emerged as a central figure in Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1992 play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Cohn’s feistiness, his surly defiance – and, yes, his charm – were frequently flourished to conceal vast insecurities, particularly regarding his sexuality. As his friend Sidney Zion once wrote, ‘Roy lived in a closet that was the oddest in history – a closet with neon lights – but he maintained it fiercely.’

A streetfighter, self-promoting hustler, and scheming conman, Cohn was a nefarious actor in one unscrupulous tale after another. He was a true Zelig of the dark side. América Profesionales y académicos
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Reseñas de la crítica

‘A masterful biography . . . In their superlative biography, American Scoundrel, authors Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark sum up this wicked man . . . a gripping, frightening book, meticulously researched, about a terrible person – one whom I’d not even want to dignify as a sort of Richard III or Tony Soprano’ (Roger Lewis)
‘A book Trumpworld doesn’t want you to read . . . a propulsive, horrifying biography of Roy Cohn’ (Martin Pengelly)
'A gripping and revelatory new biography' (Christopher Grimes)
'A thorough and readable account of Cohn’s astonishing life and career . . . an elegant retelling of the lurid Cohn story . . . recounts Cohn’s eventful life in well-chosen detail' (Jennifer Szalai)
‘A definitive modern biography . . . a riveting, authoritative and page-turning account of a public figure as consequential as he was wicked . . . intrinsically fascinating because of its subject, also establishes beyond doubt the indispensable role that Cohn played in the formation and rise of the 45th and 47th president’ (Matthew d'Ancona)
'I gobbled up every page of Kai Bird’s American Scoundrel . . . This is a dirty story but, as Bird notes, one that has turned out to be seminal in American politics . . . The book is a bounteous cornucopia of midcentury sleaze and uneasily addictive for just that reason. It’s got Mafia hits and frame jobs and blackmail and bribery and election tampering. It’s got forgery and insurance scams and perjury and espionage and sex trafficking and a lot of tax evasion. It makes James Ellroy novels look like Theo of Golden by comparison, and it makes for mesmerising reading' (Laura Miller)
‘Revelatory . . . Set to be one of the most explosive books of the year . . . Prometheus gives way to Mephistopheles; pages turn wickedly fast . . . The venality and corruption, blackmail and sheer brazenness of the public lying Bird portrays is eye-popping, infuriating, disgusting – yet also, at times, darkly comic . . . If you want to understand Donald Trump, read this book’
'Effective . . . Bird gives us a new way to think about Cohn, Trump and the legacy of McCarthyism . . . Looking at the long arc of Cohn’s career shows how much of McCarthyism was about ambition and careerism, rather than ideology. Cohn’s friends and clients were obsequious to him because they thought he could get them things no one else could'
'An astonishing biography . . . The book excels as a masterful dissection of Cohn’s strange, contradictory and immoral character . . . It adds up to an extraordinary portrait of a singular American figure whose callousness and brazenness continue to mar the country 40 years after his death'
'A comprehensive portrait of a truculent lawyer who shot to infamy in the 1950s and remained a scandalous figure until his death . . . A thorough, deeply reported life story of the gleefully villainous lawyer who moulded a U.S. president'
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