Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness: a Reluctant Memoir

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In this moving and engrossing memoir, veteran television news producer Richard Cohen relates a life spent dealing with multiple sclerosis, first diagnosed when he was 25 years old and just getting started in the competitive world of broadcast journalism. As his career progressed, he struggled not only with the disease but the touchy question of how much of the truth about himself to share with colleagues and potential employers. Cohen spent much of his life running from the onset of the disease's symptoms from which his father and grandmother also suffered. Defiantly, he took challenging, sometimes extremely dangerous assignments in Lebanon, Poland, and on the domestic political campaign trail, even as his body deteriorated. But over the course of Blindsided, it becomes apparent that illness had actually built Cohen up even as it ripped him apart. Without the physical and mental toughness required to navigate a journalist's life while fighting back loss of eyesight and poor equilibrium, it's doubtful that the flaky kid we meet early in the book would transform into the award-winning professional Cohen eventually becomes. His marriage to journalist Meredith Vieira, every bit his equal as both newshound and deadpan cynical comic, gave Cohen the stable family life and children he needed when MS made it impossible to continue in a traditional news job. But two bouts with colon cancer in the late 1990s tested his resolve and his family's patience. While Cohen is both courageous and inspirational, Blindsided is not the overly sentimental clichéd tale that stories about fighting illness often become. He refuses to paint himself as the hero (except when making fun of his own failure to be heroic) and recounts in detail the strain that he put on his marriage and children. Stories such as this often end with the memoirist arriving at a state of peace and mental clarity but again Cohen remains more compelling and credible by offering no such pat answers. As with most people fighting to preserve their families, their lives, and their bodies, Richard Cohen's is an ongoing struggle. --John Moe


From Publishers Weekly
In 1972, when he was 25, Cohen, an up-and-coming television journalist, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a disease for which there is no cure. In this wrenching memoir, he tells how he has for the past 30 years succeeded in his determination to "cope and to hope." For a long time, he hid his condition from friends and co-workers, taking on dangerous assignments for CBS in Poland, Lebanon and El Salvador even though his mobility and vision were impaired. He became a senior producer at CBS, and although he eventually quit the station in 1987 because he felt it was pandering to commercial and political pressures, he worked as a producer for PBS, CNN and Fox until he left TV in the late 1990s to become a writer and teacher. In spite of his illness, he also married and had three children. He nearly lost his courage in 1999 when he learned that he had colon cancer, but after two operations and the realization that despair and anger would drive his family away, he come to grips with this, too. In painful detail, he chronicles the progress of multiple sclerosis - the increasing numbness in his hands and legs and the resultant falls, loss of vision to the point where he is now legally blind and, lately, mental confusion. Nevertheless, he writes: "These pages are not about suffering.... This book is about surviving and flourishing, rising above fear and self-doubt and, of course, anger." His wife, Meredith Vieira, a well-known television personality, has been portrayed in popular magazines as a martyr who bears a terrible burden. Cohen proves that nothing could be further from the truth. First serial rights to People magazine.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
In his mid-twenties, Cohen was an up-and-coming television journalist. He had been covering the Nixon presidency and was working on a documentary series hosted by Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer. Then he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an affliction his father had been battling for decades, and he has spent the last 30 years discovering all sorts of interesting and frightening things about himself. Blindness came as something of a shock, waking up one morning and no longer being able to see out of his right eye (although the impaired vision didn't stop him from reporting on fighting in Beirut and El Salvador in the early '80s). Then there were the operations, the cancer diagnoses, the progressive physical deterioration. But, despite all this, Cohen's story is an uplifting one, primarily because he has such a realistic take on his own life. In the latter part of the book, he writes with great joy about his wife (television host Meredith Viera) and his children; ultimately, his is a story of overcoming adversity and not being beaten by it--a traditional-enough theme for a book, perhaps, but still an important one, if told in the right way. It is here. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


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Longtime journalist and former television producer Cohen recounts with aplomb and high character his years battling chronic illness. This couldn't have been easy to write. The author is reticent by nature, so laying bare the impact of multiple sclerosis and cancer-his malfunctioning limbs, numb appendages, bad gut, loss of vision, his anger, his fragile grip on life-is an act of emotional health that, though salubrious, clashes with some of his basic instincts. Multiple sclerosis has no treatment, no certain outcome, no definitive cause, and no cure; it is a process, a grim pileup on the central nervous system. Cohen tested limits, postponed consequences, and practiced denial, then started learning the art of candor: to whom and when to be honest about his illness. After stints in Gdansk and Beirut, this television producer on a rip admitted that his death-defying behavior was absurd, that he was not right and fit as rain. Nonetheless, he wanted (along with other things, like walking upright and seeing straight) a woman in his life and a family. He found Meredith Vieira, also in the TV business, whose desire to be a hands-on mother made her a cause celebre among some in the 60 Minutes studio. And Cohen was busy elsewhere, with their children, learning that "those who battle with illness are blind to the fact that even in our pain, we give to our loved ones, even as we receive." As a parent, he realized, "a temporary ileostomy was the least of my worries. . . . I laughed ruefully, bitterly, at the situation and at myself." Via a number of sources, Cohen ultimately learns that coping is "just a quiet task aimed at emotional well-being, if not survival," and that there will likely be manyjarring moments ahead for everyone. He lays out these lessons in unflappable prose, freely acknowledging that his behavior is not always so even-tempered. A sharp and affecting piece of perspective-setting. Agent: Joann Davis


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