The Chicago Cubs - by Rich Cohen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The New York Times bestselling author of Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football "knocks it out of the park" (Vanity Fair) in this captivating blend of sports reportage and memoir, exploring the history of the 2016 World Series champions, the Chicago Cubs.

When Rich Cohen was eight years old, his father took him to see a Cubs game. On the way out of the park, his father asked him to make a promise. "Promise me you will never be a Cubs fan. The Cubs do not win," he explained, "and because of that, a Cubs fan will have a diminished life determined by low expectations. That team will screw up your life."

Cohen became not just a Cubs fan but one of the biggest Cubs fans in the world. In this book, he captures the story of the team, its players and crazy days. Billy Sunday and Ernie Banks, Three Finger Brown and Ryne Sandberg, Bill Buckner, the Bartman Ball, Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo--the early dominance followed by a 107 year trek across the wilderness. It's all here, in The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse--not just what happened, but what it felt like and what it meant.

Featuring extensive interviews with players, owners, and coaches, this mix of memoir, reporting, history, and baseball theology--forty years in the making--has never been written because it never could be. Only with the 2016 World Series can the true arc of the story finally be understood.

Review Quotes

Plenty enough illumination to wow casual baseball fans and engage even the hardest-core Cubs fan . . . that long-awaited World Series win was undoubtedly a gift, and Cohen did with it what the best writers do: He turned it into something lasting."--Josh Noel, Chicago Tribune

The best sports book of 2017.--J. Kemper Campbell, Lincoln Journal Star

"[There] is already a succession of books on the Chicago Cubs' historic 2016 World Series championship . . . but [Cohen's] might be the best, since it's both a deeply satisfying historical account of that colorful franchise and a compelling, all-too-painful personal narrative of one longtime, besotted Cubs fan. --Booklist, starred review

[Cohen] rehearses in swift, entertaining fashion the genesis of the team and its glory years (there were many early on) and long decades of mediocrity . . . His many personal stories, strung like holiday lights throughout the narrative, illuminate a fan's frangible heart that annually repaired itself.--Kirkus

About the Author

Rich Cohen is the New York Times-bestselling author of Tough Jews, Monsters, Sweet and Low, The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones, The Chicago Cubs, and The Last Pirate of New York, and, with Jerry Weintraub, When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead. He is the cocreator of the HBO series Vinyl, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and a writer at large for Air Mail. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper's Magazine, among other publications. Cohen has won the Great Lakes Book Award, the Chicago Public Library's 21st Century Award, and the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. He lives in Connecticut.