David Herkt

Greatest Hits, by David Cohen (Mākaro Press, 2014), 316 pp., $35

Language can be a weapon, as David Cohen, armed only with his words and phrases, very ably demonstrates in Greatest Hits, an anthology of pieces drawn from a quarter century of media-work. In a Listener review of 2006 he so thoroughly deflates the orange-tinted pretentions of U2 and Bono, the band’s frontman, that it becomes impossible to see the ‘great’ rocker’s performance except through Cohen’s vision of bloated corporate emptiness. In ‘Kingdom of the curdled-milk sheik’, written for the National Business Review in 2009, Cohen’s invitation from Saudi Arabia to participate in a press junket becomes the understated means whereby the freedom-loving proclamations of the kingdom are shown to be just as substantial as a mirage of dairy show-farms on desert sand dunes.

Cohen is a Wellington-based writer, a sometime Guardian and Listener columnist, a correspondent on media affairs for the NBR, a sometime satirist and, that old fashioned term, a mordant wit. If the column is one of the media-styles of our age, then Cohen excels at it, able to tease import from apparent trivia. He has often succeeded at that hardest task, gaining unique revelation from a well-practised interviewee. His idiosyncrasies usually play to his strengths. [Read more…]