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Blindsided

Lifting a Life Above Illness: A Reluctant Memoir

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

A hopeful look at coping with the ravages of serious chronic illness by an accomplished journalist, a contributing columnist for the New York Times, and former senior producer of the CBS Evening News

Richard Cohen, a veteran journalist, has lived with multiple sclerosis for 30 years. Diagnosed with colon cancer twice in recent years, Cohen chronicles and celebrates a life brimming over with accomplishment and adversity, while struggling for emotional health.

Autobiographical at its roots, reportorial, and expansive, Blindsided explores the effects of illness on raising three children and his relationship with wife Meredith Vieira (host of ABC's The View). He tackles the nature of denial and resilience and the redemptive effects of a loving family, and does so with grace, humor, and lyrical prose.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 8, 2003
      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
      .

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  • English

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