Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness: A Reluctant Memoir

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.

Illness came calling when Richard M. Cohen was twenty-five years old. He was a young television news producer with expectations of a limitless future, and his foreboding that his health was not quite right turned into the harsh reality that something was very wrong when he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. For thirty years Cohen has done battle with MS, only to be ambushed by two bouts of colon cancer at the end of the millennium. And yet, he has writ-ten a hopeful book about celebrating life and coping with chronic illness.

"Welcome to my world," writes Cohen, "where I carry around dreams, a few diseases, and the determination to live life my way. This book is my daily conversation with myself, a chronicle of the struggles in that exotic place just north of the neck. At the moment, my attitude checks out well. I do believe I'm winning."

Autobiographical at its roots, reportorial, and expansive, Blindsided explores the effects of illness on raising three children and on his relationship with his wife, Meredith Vieira (host of ABC's The View and the syndicated Who Wants To Be A Millionaire). Cohen tackles the nature of denial and resilience, the ins and outs of the struggle for emotional health, and the redemptive effects of a loving family. And while he may not have chosen to live with illness, illness did choose him. Written with grace, humor, and lyrical prose, Blindsided presents a life brimming over with accomplishment and joy in adversity.

“Cohen may be ‘legally blind’ but his book paints an incredibly sharp picture of what it is like to live passionately—with joy, love, and anger—when besieged by chronic illnesses.” - Dr. Harold Varmus, President, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Former Director, National Institutes of Health

“Blindsided is beautifully written and utterly honest. May we all be so brave and caring in our own families.” - Tom Brokaw

“With aplomb and high character [Cohen] lays out…lessons in unflappable prose…. A sharp and affecting piece of perspective-setting.” - Kirkus Reviews

“[Blindsided] paints an incredibly sharp picture of what it is like to live passionately—with joy, love, and anger.” - Dr. Harold Varmus, President, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Former Director, National Institutes of Health

“[A] powerful memoir, tough in the way Cohen’s old news bosses would have wanted it to be tough.” - New York Times Book Review

“...a warm, sarcastic, unflinching dissection of love, pain, laughter and wounded pride.” - Chicago Tribune

“Richard Cohen has written a brutally honest and compelling account of living with devastating illness for more than 30 years. A disturbing and profoundly moving chronicle of one family’s struggle to survive.” - Christopher Reeve

“I cannot remember ever being more profoundly moved by any book I have ever read.…Don’t miss this book.” - Beverly Sills

“A powerful and agonizingly frank description of a life with which many chronically ill people and their families will identify.” - Library Journal (starred review)

“Eloquent and brutally honest.” - Seattle Times

“Blindsided is a powerful memoir, tough in the way Cohen’s old news bosses would have wanted to be tough. It doesn’t flinch and it doesn’t whine.” - New York Times Book Review