Editorial Note

David H. Cohen

David Cohen has been a professional writer for over two decades and has worked for large corporations as well as world-class news organizations. His involvement with the written word extends from journalism and corporate editorial work to training and education, where he has helped clients develop their powers of communication. This award-winning writer has covered healthcare, financial services, conservation and land-use issues. He has produced features, newsletters, brochures, Web and marketing copy, and a novel-length manuscript.

Twenty-five years ago I fulfilled a long-standing ambition to live in Russia. I had visited St. Petersburg in the spring of 1994, but I wanted to work and live in Moscow, not simply visit, and feel that I had entered the life of the city. For most of my adult life, Russia had been a consuming interest. As an undergraduate, I studied Russian history, geography, and economics. I spent several semesters pouring over Russian language primers while listening to taped concerts from the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow. As a teenager, I read George F. Kennan's history of Soviet foreign policy and later his two-volume autobiography. Isaiah Berlin's Russian Thinkers became an essential text. Russia since the Napoleonic wars, late-Imperial Russia, the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Isaac Deutscher's biographies, the Comintern and the rise of international communism--these topics were keenly interesting.

My opportunity to live in the capital came after the fall of the party dictatorship in 1991. This inaugurated a spell of about ten years when Westerners could freely explore Russian life in the capital without worrying about the authorities. So in February 1997, after laying careful plans from Chicago, I flew to Moscow to assume a teaching appointment at Moscow State University. I recorded my impressions in the journal that I have chosen to publish here. (Images: To the left, Moscow State University; to the right, Mayakovskaya Metro station.)

Read Moscow Journal or The Bratislava Option (Adobe 347 K).

The Fibonacci Deception captures the romance of trading commodities in a financial thriller set in Chicago in the year 2000. Tom Winters, an unemployed financial analyst, meets Amy, a smart, ambitious reporter covering the markets at the Chicago Board of Trade. With the help of a Russian mathematician, the three contrive a plan to make money in futures, a profitable but illicit scheme. In the midst of their trading, a crisis in the grain fields erupts when genetically modified seeds sold by a bioscience company menace food production in the U.S. A blackmailer enters the picture and threatens the trio of traders with exposure and government prosecution, forcing them to confront the law while putting Tom's loyalty to Amy to the test. This engaging story of romance and trading should appeal to readers with an interest in markets and the impact of money on love.

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