A collection of the finest New York Times columns written by Roger Cohen, enhanced by an original 20,000-word essay on the years in which he wrote them
From award-winning New York Times journalist Roger Cohen comes a selection of his most trenchant pieces spanning the twelve years he spent as a columnist. During this time, he wrote about America's internal fracture, the Trump presidency's threat to democracy at home and abroad, China, the plight of refugees, COVID-19, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the unquenchable human quest for dignity, and more. These pieces reflect Cohen's attempt to hold power to account in the name of freedom, decency, pluralism, and the importance of dissent in open society.
The hundreds of thousands of readers who followed his column and mourned its end responded above all to what they saw as the marriage in his writing of head and heart. That tenor permeates An Affirming Flame. In it, Cohen explores themes of displacement, belonging, and his own craft of journalism, in which, he argues, the essential task of bearing witness endures despite the tumult of technological change. His writing, at once lucid and passionate, captures the fight to defend America's openness, capacity for renewal, and promise against walls, retrogression, lies, and division. This struggle is inseparable from the battle to save the world from the creeping autocracy of the twenty-first century. As he writes, “On lies is tyranny built.”
