Four Friends
In his masterful pieces for Vanity Fair and in his bestselling books, William D. Cohan has proven to be one of the most meticulous and intrepid journalists covering the world of Wall Street and high finance. In his utterly original new book, Four Friends, he brings all of his brilliant reportorial skills to a subject much closer to home: four friends of his who died young. Like Cohan, all four attended Andover, the most elite boarding school in America, before spinning out into very different orbits. Indelibly, using copious interviews from wives, girlfriends, colleagues, and friends, Cohan brings these men to life on the page.
Jack Berman, the child of impoverished Holocaust survivors, uses his unlikely Andover pedigree to achieve the American dream, only to be cut down in an unimaginable act of violence. Will Daniel, Harry Truman’s grandson and the son of the managing editor of The New York Times, does everything possible to escape the burdens of a family legacy he’s ultimately trapped by. Harry Bull builds the life of a careful, successful Chicago lawyer and heir to his family’s fortune...before taking an inexplicable and devastating risk on a beautiful summer day. And the life and death of John F. Kennedy Jr.—a story we think we know—is told here with surprising new details that cast it in an entirely different light.
Four Friends is an immersive, wide-ranging, tragic, and ultimately inspiring account of promising lives cut short, written with compassion, honesty, and insight. It not only captures the fragility of life but also its poignant, magisterial, and pivotal moments.
ACCODLADES
PRAISE
“This luminous book from the superb Bill Cohan is an elegant, poignant, arresting story, showing us two descendants of American Presidents and two of their classmates close up at a legendary boarding school and how their lives later ended with sudden accident and violence. In Cohan’s masterly rendering, some of the scenes in this volume recall the John Knowles classic 'A Separate Peace.' This is an unforgettable book about friendship, privilege, character, ambition and the unpredictability of human life.” - Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling author of Presidents of War
“William Cohan has written a beautiful and heartbreaking book about friendship and privilege, in a corner of American life that suddenly feels very far away.” - Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times bestselling author of The Tipping Point and Blink
“Four Friends is a tender, bracing meditation on ends and beginnings, large dreams and larger misfortunes, outsized promise and unfathomable loss. It is also an indelible portrait of a time and place, at once masterfully researched and deeply personal. Cohan writes with a reporter’s acuity and a memoirist’s subtlety; if he can’t explain the inexplicable, he does deliver us, gracefully and unsparingly, right to its doorstep.” – Stacy Schiff, Pultizer Prize-winning author of A Great Improvisation
“Deeply moving, Four Friends explores the idea of fate and shattered promise with intelligence and heart. It will haunt you and make you think.” – Susan Orlean, New York Times bestselling author of The Library Book
“Four Friends is a wrenching, beautifully woven story about fate, friendship and the shattered dreams of once-golden privileged men. I couldn’t put it down”. – Jonathan Alter, New York Times bestselling author of The Center Holds
“Combining a friend's heartfelt sense of loss with the meticulous precision of a seasoned reporter, William Cohan has created a fascinating, often harrowing examination of what happens when promise succumbs to tragedy. A book that continues to resonate long after you've finished the last page.” - Nathaniel Philbrick, National Book Award-winning author of In the Heart of the Sea and In the Hurricane's Eye
“I read this book captivated throughout, and often moved. In Cohan's elegant telling, it's more than four tragic endings. This is a contemplation of the twisting course of any life; how early hopes age; and how few of us become quite what was expected. An excellent book.” – Tom Rachman, New York Times bestselling author of The Imperfectionists and The Italian Teacher
LIBRARYJOURNAL.COM
Cohan is a masterful biographer, even if the occasional slip into armchair cultural anthropologist misses the mark. His detailed research spans newspaper accounts and school records to weave a full narrative of privilege and tragedy.
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SHELF-AWARENESS.COM
In Four Friends: Promising Lives Cut Short, veteran journalist William D. Cohan (The Price of Silence), a 1977 graduate of the school, tells the stories of four of his Andover contemporaries whose lives were launched on that path to prominence. Each, however, died suddenly in his late 30s, or just beyond. As much as it is an account of those tragically brief lives, Cohan's book is a frank meditation on the fragility and preciousness of life at any age.
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Kirkusreviews.com
A memoir/biography about four of the author’s Andover classmates, each of whom died an early, violent death...
An emotionally intense reminder—though not always intentionally so—that even privilege must kneel before fate.