Daniel Edward Cohen (born March 12, 1936 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American non-fiction writer who has produced over one-hundred books, mainly for young audiences.

Biography

Cohen attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he graduated with degree in journalism in 1958. After graduation he worked as a proofreader at Time, Inc. before becoming an editor for Science Digest. In 1969 he moved to upstate New York with his wife, Susan, to begin a career as a freelance children’s writer. The couple had one daughter, named Theodora.

Career

Cohen is best known for his paperbacks about UFO, ghosts, psychic phenomena, cryptozoology, and the occult. Though Cohen is a self-described skeptic and onetime member of CSICOP, his books on paranormal phenomena take a more light-hearted, open-minded stance and tend to avoid dogmatic debunking. Some of these books include The World of UFOs (1978), The Encyclopedia of Monsters (1981), The Great Airship Mystery (1981), How to Test Your ESP (1982), Phone Call from a Ghost (1988), Ghostly Tales of Love and Revenge (1992), and The Ghost of Elvis and Other Celebrity Spirits (1994). Cohen is also the author of the controversial Curses, Hexes and Spells (1974), which has appeared on several “banned books” lists due to its perceived advocacy of magic and witchcraft. Curses, Hexes, and Spells is number 73 on the American Library Association's list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000..

Cohen has written on numerous other topics, including sports, history, dinosaurs, nature, technology, and folklore. He currently lives in New Jersey.

Pan Am 103

Cohen lost his daughter, Theodora, in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103. He and his wife Susan cowrote a book about it, entitled Pam Am 103: The Bombing, The Betrayals, and a Bereaved Family's Search for Justice. They frequently advocate for the victims in the press as well.

In August 2009, Daniel and Susan Cohen decried the release of the bomber on grounds of compassion, saying "I cannot imagine having compassion for a mass murderer and terrorist who killed 270 people." Susan Cohen, in The Daily Telegraph adds, "You want to feel sorry for anyone, please feel sorry for me, feel sorry for my poor daughter, her body falling a mile through the air."

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Daniel Cohen", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0