“A thorough and readable account of Cohn’s astonishing life and career…an elegant retelling of the lurid Cohn story…recounts Cohn’s eventful life in well-chosen detail.”
—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
 
“Gripping…Kai Bird (assisted by his wife, Susan Goldmark) is best known for having co-authored the Pulitzer prizewinning biography of Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, later adapted by Christopher Nolan, and in Cohn he finds another subject who was, in his own less disciplined way, a destroyer of worlds.”
—The Times (UK)
 
“A dishy, deeply sourced biography which goes the distance….Trump may be Cohn’s most consequential legacy, but his life had everything storytellers crave: power, villainy, transgression and, ultimately, comeuppance…..If Lucifer had practiced law, his career might have resembled Cohn’s.”
—Jack Shafer, Bloomberg

“A book Trumpworld doesn’t want you to read…a propulsive, horrifying biography.”
—Martin Pengelly, Guardian
 
“A gripping and revelatory new biography.”
—Christopher Grimes, Financial Times

“Notorious is the word most often used to describe Cohn, so much so that an image of his face ought to sit adjacent to it in the dictionary….Reading American Scoundrel, we discover many things, large and small, that Trump learned from his mentor….It’s hard to think of another figure who has had such a profound and lasting impact on Trump as Cohn, whose aggressive style and amoral bearing continue to impact our world.”
—James Kirchik, The Free Press

“In American Scoundrel, the master biographer Kai Bird points us to a universe where ideology matters less than crass opportunism in the pursuit of money, sex, and power—where extreme narcissists will shatter everything around them to get their way. This was Roy Cohn’s world; Donald Trump is his inheritor….American Scoundrel will remind anyone outraged by our current culture that ‘elite impunity’ is nothing new. Then, as now, power and celebrity attracted allies.”
—Martin Di Caro, The American Conservative
 
“I gobbled up every page of Kai Bird’s American Scoundrel…This is a dirty story but, as Bird notes, one that has turned out to be seminal in American politics…The book is a bounteous cornucopia of midcentury sleaze and uneasily addictive for just that reason. It’s got Mafia hits and frame jobs and blackmail and bribery and election tampering. It’s got forgery and insurance scams and perjury and espionage and sex trafficking and a lot of tax evasion. It makes James Ellroy novels look like Theo of Golden by comparison, and it makes for mesmerizing reading.”
—Laura Miller, Slate
 
“Roy Marcus Cohn was the kingmaker from hell…Cohn’s brutish course through the corridors of power was, to a large extent, a template for Trump’s later on. In their new book American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, biographer Kai Bird and his wife and chief researcher, Susan Goldmark, tell the long, sordid tale of how one ‘narcissistic con artist’—as they characterize Cohn —did so much to create another, the man who now occupies the most powerful office in the world.”
—Foreign Affairs
 
“Notorious is the word most often used to describe Cohn, so much so that an image of his face ought to sit adjacent to it in the dictionary….Reading American Scoundrel, we discover many things, large and small, that Trump learned from his mentor….It’s hard to think of another figure who has had such a profound and lasting impact on Trump as Cohn, whose aggressive style and amoral bearing continue to impact our world.”
—James Kirchik, The Free Press

“Effective…Bird gives us a new way to think about Cohn, Trump, and the legacy of McCarthyism…Looking at the long arc of Cohn’s career shows how much of McCarthyism was about ambition and careerism, rather than ideology. Cohn’s friends and clients were obsequious to him because they thought he could get them things no one else could.”
—The Atlantic
 
“A magisterial biography of the notorious lawyer and Trump whisperer that is indispensable reading for anyone who wants to understand the current political moment.”
—The Forward
 
“Masterful…a gripping, frightening book, meticulously researched, about a terrible person—one whom I’d not even want to dignify as a sort of Richard III or Tony Soprano.”
—Roger Lewis, Daily Telegraph
 
“A riveting, authoritative, and page-turning account of a public figure as consequential as he was wicked . . . intrinsically fascinating because of its subject, also establishes beyond doubt the indispensable role that Cohn played in the formation and rise of the 45th and 47th president.”
—Matthew d’Ancona, The New World

“An astonishing biography…The book excels as a masterful dissection of Cohn’s strange, contradictory, and immoral character…It adds up to an extraordinary portrait of a singular American figure whose callousness and brazenness continue to mar the country 40 years after his death.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
 
“The venality and corruption, blackmail and sheer brazenness of the public lying Bird portrays is eye-popping, infuriating, disgusting—yet also, at times, darkly comic.…If you want to understand Donald Trump, read this book.”
—The Bookseller
 
“A comprehensive portrait of a truculent lawyer who shot to infamy in the 1950s and remained a scandalous figure until his death…A thorough, deeply reported life story of the gleefully villainous lawyer who molded a U.S. president.”
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
 
“This deeply researched, admirably balanced, and propulsively paced biography is key to understanding the current political culture.”
—Booklist (Starred Review)

“A PROPULSIVE, MIND BOGGLING READ… Kai Bird pins this alternate moral universe to the page brilliantly and even-handedly.”
—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Cleopatra: A Life and The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
 
“POWERFUL AND ILLUMINATING…Roy Cohn is emblematic of dark and perennial forces in our national life…Bird has delivered a vital volume.”
—Jon Meacham, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
 
“THE DEFINITIVE BOOK ON ROY COHN…Cohn’s influence on our time is incalculable and we are living in the long shadow of his legacy….American Scoundrel is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand Donald Trump’s America.”
—Jeremy Strong, Emmy, Golden Globe, and Tony-winning actor, and Academy Award nominee for his portrayal of Roy Cohn in The Apprentice
 
“AN EXTRAORDINARY, UP-CLOSE VIEW OF COHN’S INTERNAL WIRING…A brilliantly reported and vividly written biography that will mesmerize readers from its opening pages.”
—Ken Auletta, longtime contributor to The New Yorker and bestselling author of Googled: The End of the World as We Know It

“A MUST-READ FOR THESE DARK DAYS. To understand the president who has hurled this country into chaos, we must tap the root—get to the source.  American Scoundrel does just that by detailing the life of Roy Cohn. It is, in the end, a thorough and poignant account of a moral monster.”
—Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries

“A NARRATIVE MASTERWORK. With a scholar’s rigor and a novelist’s sense of drama, Bird vividly creates the sinister web of charm and deceit that Cohn was able to spin through his decades at the very center of power.”
—Marie Brenner, award-winning writer-at-large for Vanity Fair, author of The Desperate Hours, and coproducer of the documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn?

“KAI BIRD DOES THE IMPOSSIBLE. He tells the story of one of America's arch villains, with new evidence of his mendacity, contempt for the law, megalomania, and cruelty, but does so without descending into caricature.”
—David Nasaw, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of The Patriarch

“A MUST-READ FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO UNDERSTAND NOT JUST THE DARK ROLE PLAYED BY ROY COHN IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN POLITICS, BUT THE MAN’S LASTING INFLUENCE INTO THIS CENTURY….There is, it turns out, a direct line from the malign influence of McCarthyism to that of Trumpism, and Roy Cohn is it.”
—Susan Glasser, staff writer for The New Yorker and bestselling coauthor of The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“GRIPPING…If you want to understand America today, you (sadly!) need to understand Donald Trump. And if you want to understand Trump, you need to understand Roy Cohn. This book is invaluable for that task.”
—William Kristol, formerly Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States and founder of The Weekly Standard; currently, editor-at-large of The Bulwark