I bought the Audiobook American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump. I’m several hours into it. This is such a well written book. It is fully realized. It is relevant to our age. It is full of depth and reflects arduous work by a talented author Kai Bird. He has written about an infamous grifter who provided a blueprint for other aspiring grifters in our post-truth, post-shame era. American Scoundrel is surely a book that helps us understand our current condition.
But I’m having trouble getting through the book. I dread listening to it. Descending into the psyche of Roy Cohn is extremely toxic, abrasive and unbearable. The descent is unrelenting. There are no comic respites. The life of Roy Cohn is so predictably malevolent. He is such a bad actor. Combining this history with the news events of the day is overwhelming me.
I have nine hours to go and honestly, I’m not sure I want to complete the journey, but I feel I have to. Finishing a book, in written or audio form, because of a sense of obligation is not a place I want to be in. But such are the decisions we make as readers and as part of an audience of performed books.
I may delude myself and “take a pause” from the book and start listening to the Audiobook Brady: An American Story and the Price of Greatness by Lars Anderson. I haven’t watched sports in over a decade, but I usually enjoy sports biographies. They provide a pleasant diversion from the brutality of the real world.
My aversion to Roy Cohn does not mean I’m not averse to reading about dark subjects. In fact, I am gulping with great pleasure the Kindle version of Evan Gershkovich’s memoir This Cursed Beautiful Land, which is about this journalist’s survival in a Russian prison. So there is hope for me. Reading about a Wall Street Journal writer learning how to co-exist with hardened Russian criminals is riveting. Descending into the diabolical mind of Roy Cohn is simply intolerable.
So I’ve convinced myself to pause American Scoundrel. The problem isn’t that Kai Bird failed. In some sense, he succeeded all too well.
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