Play like a pro with expert knowledge from a champion of the game

If you don't know the ins and outs of play, bridge can seem like an intimidating game--but it doesn't have to be! Armed with the techniques and strategies in the pages of this book, you'll be bidding and winning hands like a boss! A good book for beginners, it has lots of advanced techniques useful to experienced players, too. This is as  close to an all-in-one bridge book you can get.

 

 

About the Author

H. Anthony Medley holds the rank of Silver life Master, is an American Contract Bridge League Club Director, and has won regional and sectional titles. An attorney, he received his B.S. from UCLA, where he was sports editor of UCLA's Daily Bruin, and his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He is the author of UCLA Basketball: The Real Story and Sweaty Palms: The Neglected Art of Being Interviewed and The Complete Idiots Guide to Bridge. He was a columnist for the Southern California Bridge News. He is an MPAA-certified film critic and his work has appeared nationally in Good Housekeeping, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. Click the book to order.
 

  

 

Where’s my Roy Cohn? (1/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 97 minutes.

PG-13

This is yet another film masquerading as a "documentary" by a leftwing Democrat activist, this one named Matt Tyrnauer. In fact the bias is communicated in the production notes that read, “Roy Cohn’s best known exploits include: secretly and unethically communicating with the judge to send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair; collaborating with Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt; spearheading J Edgar Hoover and McCarthy’s crusade to hound homosexuals out of government; choreographing the New York State primary to split the vote and place Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office; spreading damaging stories about Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, scuttling her historic bid for the vice presidency; abusing the law to keep many of America’s murderous mafioso’s out of jail; and looting the bank accounts of his legal clients.”

Wow! But just because someone says something is evil does not make it so. Let’s take a few of these allegations. First, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg did transmit nuclear secrets to Russia as primary actors in facilitating communist Russia getting the atomic bomb. If anybody deserved the death penalty for treason, they did.

Second, Sen. McCarthy’s work was only a “witch hunt” to communists because there were communists in the State Department. Alger Hiss, who was ardently defended by people like Trynauer (who was wasn't born yet) was an active spy for the communists, which was confirmed when the records of the Soviet regime were finally seen after the fall of communism in Russia.

Cohn was the attorney for the Mafiosos, and it was his job to defend them to the best of his ability. John Adams defended the British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre. What’s the difference?

Tyrnauer interviews a long list of people, including Ken Auletta, Liz Smith, Jason Epstein, Anne Roiphe, Marie Brenner, Martin London, Robert Cohen, and others, all of whom are Democrat donors. It’s hardly balanced by an interview with Roger Stone.

But throughout you get the idea that Tyrnauer’s main point is not to paint Roy Cohn in a bad light (which, let’s face it, is not difficult to do), it’s to tie him in to Donald Trump (who apparently asked the titular question at one point)! Ah, Hollywood.

While this is interesting, it is so terribly biased and clumsy (saying cruel things like his mother was the ugliest woman in New York) it should be taught in film school as an epitome of artless advocacy which has no place in a proper documentary. Cohn was a difficult guy with a lot to criticize (that’s an understatement). But even he deserves a more even-handed treatment than this one that obviously went into the project with its mind made up and its eye on the target in Washington.

 

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