A best-selling unauthorised portrait of New Zealand’s 40th prime minister, based on more than 100 interviews with admirers and critics alike. The book traces Jacinda Ardern from childhood and early working years through to her remarkable political rise and fall, and into her different kind of post-parliamentary career.

“Even-handed and serious. … Sheds light on her government’s fatal weaknesses.”

— Danyl McLaughlin, NZ Listener

“Reveals Cohen as an astute judge of political issues and personalities.”

—Nevil Gibson, National Business Review

“[This] is not just a star-struck hagiography of Leonard. It is part memoir, part travelogue, part meditation, part potpourri. It is also, to a large extent, a conversation between Cohen and the reader. He gushes, leaps, stops and ponders, dances on and pins us back with his glittering eye. Highly opinionated, he always has a strong view on everything, but particularly music. His views can be irritating, even infuriating, but they are always challenging. … At the risk of dilettantism, Cohen draws in a wide range of references. He locates Leonard within the context of the wide Jewish tradition, then triangulates his place in Western intellectual history, from Saint Augustine to Susan Sontag. From Sontag, he takes the amusing position that reviews are ‘the intellect's revenge on art’. [But] his book would seem to belie that idea.”

— Steve Walker, Your Weekend

A self-taught son of Irish immigrants, devout Catholic, King Country farmer and farming lobbyist, Jim Bolger entered New Zealand political life in the 1970s. He was a flinty Minister of Labour under Robert Muldoon and Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997. As ambassador to Washington, he helped create warmer relations with the United States. In recent years, he has chaired boards, has been the chancellor of the University of Waikato and marked more than a half-century of marriage to Joan.

Never given to orthodoxies, yet staunchly National in his politics, in his still-energetic eighties he remains an impressively brisk progressive thinker. For six months he regularly sat down on Fridays with the writer David Cohen to reflect on his life and times, our nation and the world. Fridays with Jim reveals a quintessential man of the old New Zealand who is fully in sync with the new New Zealand, and with plenty of ideas about where it’s all heading.

“Cohen was raised on the New Musical Express School of Reporting, during the mid-1970s heyday of Julie Burchill, Charles Shaar Murray and Tony Parsons, when sea-freighted copies of the paper would arrive in New Zealand months after publication date. Style, not immediacy, was the traded object. Attitude was everything, and Cohen excels at the politics of stance.

Greatest Hits is a fascinating how-to-do-it by which media students could profit – if, in the future, there is journalism as we know it, or practitioners of the profession who haven’t moved to the manipulations of public relations. Cohen’s ability to find a story in his inability to find a story is the true mark of a great journalist. His perceptions are as sharp as an assassin’s stiletto.”

— David Herkt, Landfall

“I ADORE this book.”

— Julie Burchill

Ten years ago, a couple of troublemakers called David Farrar and Jordan Williams started the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union, an advocacy group for responsible government spending and greater political accountability. The group now has 200,000 members.

Published to mark their milestone anniversary, The Mission looks at the union’s successful campaigns (along with the odd dud one), its funniest political moments and biggest headaches, from the perspectives of those who helped make it happen.

The work draws on interviews done by David, who has also written a long historical introduction, along with a foreword by former prime minister Bill English.

 “I have long been a fan of Shochat's fabulous Middle Eastern-inspired food, so relished the opportunity not only to recreate it myself, but also to learn more about the woman behind Ima. In the fascinating introduction by author David Cohen, we learn about Yael's own ima [mother], Thelma, who spurred her daughter's love for cooking. We also learn about how in the Middle East, food is far from just food — it's spiced with history, as Cohen puts it.”

— The Six Best Cook Books Released in 2016, According to ‘Cuisine’ Magazine

"With remarkable erudition and literary elegance, David Cohen, the father of an autistic boy named Eliot, has crafted an extraordinary account of autism in his own family, and in the world. In this engaging and honest book, Cohen shows autism in all its vicissitudes in England, New Zealand, Korea, the US and Israel. A gifted writer, Cohen moves so gracefully across narratives, scientific discourses, artistic genres, historical periods and continents that you hardly notice the full force of his prose until the conclusion when, suddenly, it hits you: Cohen has made us see autism as an essential part of the human condition."

— Professor Roy Richard Grinker, author of Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism, Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University, Washington

“David Cohen has taken an important piece of social history and unpacked it in a highly imaginative way. It is completely engrossing.”

— Lloyd Jones, Man Booker prize shortlister

“As well as a case to put, Cohen has a barrow to push. Make that a bag to punch, since in addition to telling us a lot about the popular music of the times – which was indeed important to the boys’ lives and always has been to his – he tells us much more about the boxers of the times. Even the epigraph, from Corinthians 1, deals with pugilism. So we get pumped-up passages on Joe Frazier v Muhammed Ali, sustained and sometimes strained links to Ali’s rise and reel (and of course he did come to the Hutt in 1979), comparisons between the end of Mike Tyson’s reign and the end of Epuni, portraits of fighters or trainers associated with the Home. 

“Cohen’s skills, here and elsewhere, often make me wish that journalism were less ephemeral. He moves adroitly between close-up and overview. He’s pungent and plain and precise.”

— David Hill, NZ Review of Books

“A thoughtful, not to mention tremendously amusing, collection of personal observations, profiles, news stories and columns examining profound social and political changes underway, from Samoa to Korea, Argentina to Britain, as seen through the prism of university life.”

— Professor Kyongsoo Lho, Seoul National University