MAN OF ACTION
TWO-GUN COHEN, by Charles Drage; Jonathan Cape, English price 16/-. A MAN of action with a grand story to tell, General Morris Cohen, of the Chinese Nationalist Army, unbuckles his guns and tells it. Most of this biography is in the first person, and you can almost hear him talking: slangy, direct, full of reminiscence and adventure, shrewd and humorous. A Jew, Stepney-born, but his parents Polish, Cohen went to China in 1922 to become Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s bodyguard
after a wild youth spent largely in trouble arid in industrial school. He had been a professional. boxer, farm hand on a Canadian cattle ranch, card-sharp, gambler, railway sapper N.C.O. in France, real-estate hustler, In China he mixed with war lords, diplomats, bandit chiefs, pirates, Russian Communists, fought in civil wars and revolutions, and was a sort of pet bulldog (ambidextrous) and A.D.C. to Dr. Sun and the Soong family. Mah Kun, the nearest the Chinese could get to his name, was courageous ‘and resourceful and something of a showman; and if he sometimes sailed close to the wind in smuggling in arms and ammunition to Chinese revolutionaries (on commission), his employers trusted him and sent him overseas on important missions. The chronology of his story is often not clear simply because he doesn’t stop to give datesevents happen in summer or in May, but in what year?-but Cohen is a story-teller who prefers to live history rather than write it. The Tapanese took him prisoner at Hong Kong, paid off some old scores, and repatriated him to Canada in September, 1943.
W.A.
G.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 790, 10 September 1954, Page 13
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266MAN OF ACTION New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 790, 10 September 1954, Page 13
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