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Theodore Jerome Cohen is an award-winning author who has published more than ten novels—all but one of them mystery/thrillers—and two books of short stories. He also writes Young Adult (YA) novels under the pen name “Alyssa Devine” as well as illustrated children's storybooks in his Stories for the Early Years series. During the course of his 45-year career he worked as an engineer, scientist, CBS Radio Station News Service (RSNS) commentator, private investigator, and Antarctic explorer. What he’s been able to do with his background is mix fiction with reality in ways that even his family and friends have been unable to unravel!
All of his novels and many of his short stories are based on real events, some from his own life, some ripped from the headlines. Of his writing in Death by Wall Street, for example, Gary Sorkin of Pacific Book Review said: "[S]imilar to the writing style of Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy, Ted Cohen adheres to short chapters laying out a mental storyboard in the reader's mind. He possesses a writing style ideal for screenplay adaptation with visuals that can make for a good movie.
Reviewed by Joel R. Dennstedt for Readers' Favorite
One perfect word quickly comes to mind when trying to distill the effect of Theodore Jerome Cohen’s collection of short (truly short) stories in The Road Less Taken. The word is: Gripping. And I do not use that word lightly. I mean, utterly, sometimes devastatingly, gripping. Almost in the literal sense that these narratives – some more like vignettes - reach out to grasp your attention and your mind and threaten to pull your body deep inside their imaginative but all too physical reality. The brief nature of each story works to its advantage, as if one is given a tantalizing but gripping – there’s that inevitable adjective again – glimpse into a moment so intense and so fraught with consequence and pregnant with meaning, usually historical, one wants (but also fears) to hang around just to see the future outcome.
In The Road Less Taken, Theodore Jerome Cohen gives fair warning that truth and fiction are woven together closely, too closely for one to pick apart. Although this in large part explains the potency of these momentary glimpses into the past, it is Dr. Cohen’s impeccable writing skills that give to them such a ... you know the word by now ... quality. One might be sharing an old friend’s revelation of meeting secretly at night, on a ship, with the three allied leaders of WWII where the presumably well-known friend startlingly turns out to offer the sole solution to the travesties caused by German U-boats, or one might be witnessing purely through a diary’s late-to-come translation the dissolution of a young girl’s mind. The feeling throughout this profound book is one of extremely personal secrets, with major historical importance much too long withheld, suddenly exposed. Reading Dr. Cohen’s stories is a heady experience. And utterly, you know, gripping.
