You know the name Robin Cook. He’s the best-selling author of nearly forty books, renowned for pioneering the medical thriller genre with his iconic novel Coma. But before captivating millions with his gripping stories, Cook’s own life was shaped by a series of surprising twists and turns, a personal journey that he says could have easily led him down a very different path. Join us as this literary giant shares his incredible American story, revealing the unexpected childhood experiences and pivotal moments that set him on course to become the writer we know today.
Born in Brooklyn and raised first in Queens, then New Jersey, Cook recalls a childhood that could have easily taken a different turn, even brushing up against early encounters with organized crime. But a serendipitous move to Leonia, New Jersey, became a defining moment. Here, he found himself surrounded by an inspiring community of academics and fascinating neighbors, including the legendary comedian Buddy Hackett. From exploring the Museum of Natural History’s hidden rooms to cruising to high school dances in Hackett’s classic cars, Cook’s unique upbringing in Leonia cultivated his keen intellect and provided an exceptional education, laying the foundation for a future he views as a series of profoundly lucky breaks.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Up Next comes to us a story from Robin Cook. You know the name. He’s the author of thirty-eight best-selling books, a giant in the literary and publishing field, but the one he is best known for is his second book, Coma, the first true medical thriller ever released. Today, he’s sharing with us his personal story, his life story. Here’s Robin.
00:00:43
Speaker 2: I was born in Brooklyn and immediately exported to Queens and then moved over to New Jersey when I was eight. You know, I have to say that I think that I’m a particularly lucky person because everything happens seemed at the right time. If I had continued to grow up in Woodside, Queens, in that environment, my life, I think, would have been completely different. In fact, when I think back on it, I might now be; I’d probably be fairly successful, but I’d be really involved in organized crime. I can remember the older kids teaching us young kids how to steal from the store, and they liked to use us young kids because I guess the store proprietor, particularly the candy store, was less suspicious of young kids, you know, in kindergarten, and so the older kids would get us to go in and whatnot. We had what we called the alley behind the house. It was all row house, so you had an alley behind, and that was where at that time parents just opened the door, let the kids out into the alley, and we had full run of the alley from a very, very early age, and we had all sorts of games that we played in that part of my life. I remember with great fondness. But I also realized how lucky it was that my father’s business did well enough that we realized that we could move out of our apartment in Woodside, Queens. My father’s what he wanted most was a place to build a house that had a view.
00:02:27
Speaker 3: So he found a
00:02:27
Speaker 2: place over in New Jersey up on a hill, and he bought this part of land because it had a view looking west out over New Jersey. My parents never looked into this town—what the town was like—but it turns out that it was really lucky because the town was fabulous. And what was phenomenal about Leonia, New Jersey, is it was sort of like a bedroom community for a lot of academic institutions: Columbia University, the Museum of Natural History, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So my friend’s parents, a lot of them were involved in these very academic things, including my best friend. His father was Head of Dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History. Can that be any better for a kid in the fifth-sixth grade? And so we would go practically every Saturday to the Museum of Natural History. We got to go behind the scenes to see how they take these huge blocks of stone, bring them back to the museum, and then carve out these dinosaur bones and then figure out how the animal lived and what at a. So that was our Saturday mornings. But there were other people there. Two, four or five physicists on the Manhattan Project came from Leonia, New Jersey. My next-door neighbor was Buddy Hackett, and he took a great liking to me, and I babysat for his kid, and because of that I met a lot of the people like Sammy Davis Junior and Frank Sinatra because I was the babysitter, and Buddy Hackett had a miniature car collection. And you know, as a teenager, I got my license. My father wouldn’t allow me to even back the family car out
00:04:22
Speaker 3: of the garage.
00:04:22
Speaker 2: I had to wash it, but I couldn’t back it. He’d back it out, and then I’d wash it. But Buddy Hackett noticed this. He didn’t say very much, but then he started offering and allowing me to drive his cars to my high school dances.
00:04:37
Speaker 3: So I got to and
00:04:38
Speaker 2: he had a Corvette, a Jaguar, and a brand-new black Bonneville. At that time, that was really the cat’s meow. It was quite an amazing time of circumstance. Plus, the school system was fantastic. It was a school system that was way ahead of its time in terms of experimenting with rapid-learner courses or Advanced Placement courses. And I was part of a study, almost myself, in three or four or five of us were taught what they called New Math then, and so the amount of math that I had when I graduated from high school was really quite exceptional. So I think of myself as particularly lucky, because it wasn’t that my parents looked into this and said we have to find a great school system. I just found myself in this great school system in a town, a small town that’s a mile-square that had phenomenal, interesting people. I didn’t realize it at the time, but because the school system was good, because the kids were motivated.
00:05:50
Speaker 3: I was motivated.
00:05:51
Speaker 2: I am a competitive person, athletically competitive, but also competitive in an intellectual sense. And here I was in this great environment. The information was there. We had a wonderful library. After school, we would often go to the library. At a very young age, I started reading all sorts of fiction books.
00:06:13
Speaker 3: At a very young age.
00:06:15
Speaker 2: I had found myself in a public school where academic effort counted. And what a difference that makes, because then when it came to going to college, it was never any thought that I wouldn’t go to college. I have to admit I didn’t do a very good job picking a college because I was too busy. I was on this committee and on that committee, and this council and that council, and I was the valedictorian of the school, and I played sports.
00:06:47
Speaker 3: And I remember suddenly,
00:06:49
Speaker 2: I said, oh, my gosh, I’m supposed to tell the guidance counselor where I want to go to college, and I have to do it tomorrow. And I remember going down into the basement to get something in our house, and on the way up on the stairs there was a box and it said Yale Lock. And I said, “Okay, that’s telling me something.” So when I went in the next day, I said, “I want to go to Yale.”
00:07:18
Speaker 1: And when we come back, more of the story of author Robin Cook, thirty-eight best-sellers, and where he grew up. More of Robin Cook’s story here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we’re bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can’t do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we’re back with Our American Stories and with Robin Cook. When we last left off, he had just told his school counselor that he wanted to go to Yale for college, a decision he’d made because of a Yale lock he’d seen in his basement the night before. Let’s return to.
00:08:27
Speaker 2: Robin, and the counselor said, “Good choice, that’s fine,” you know, and everything else. And so we went ahead and applied and did all that sort of stuff, and I was accepted. But then I got invited to Wesleyan for their equivalent of their athletic—They don’t give athletic scholarships—but there was always a weekend where there was the home football game, and people who were on the football team had an opportunity to invite kids from
00:08:59
Speaker 3: their former high school.
00:09:01
Speaker 2: And I got invited to Wesleyan for the weekend, and I was very much interested in these two guys that had been in our high school.
00:09:10
Speaker 3: I knew them vaguely.
00:09:13
Speaker 2: But why I was so interested is both of them were pre-meds, and at that point I was pre-med. I wanted to be pre-med. So, you know, I responded to that invitation. I went to Wesleyan for a weekend and seemed fabulous, and I was taken, and I went back and then applied to Wesleyan and got to Wesleyan. Even that, I think again, that I’m a very lucky person, because it turned out that Wesleyan was a particularly good choice for me, not that Yale wouldn’t have been, although I probably wouldn’t have been able to make the football team at Yale. The reason that Wesleyan turned out to be such a good place for me to be is because it had a very unique program that ultimately played quite a big role, I think, in my life, and that was if you did well enough, and that Wesley and I did very well. Is like I did in high school. I really applied myself. And if you did well at Wesley, you were invited in your senior year to take part in what they called the Honors College, and the Honors College gave you the opportunity to write an undergraduate thesis.
00:10:28
Speaker 3: And I decided, “Hey, why not do this?” Now?
00:10:34
Speaker 2: Why I thought I could do that is, first of all, I realized that I wouldn’t get graded until after I was accepted at medical school. Plus, I had taken so many extra courses that I could have graduated probably somewhere as in my junior year, because since I was paying for college, I realized that the more courses I took, the cheaper they were. And so anyway, prior to that, I think the longest paper I had written maybe was like five pages, which seemed terribly long, or ten pages maybe at the most, and I wrote significantly more than one hundred pages. So why that is so significant for me is because later on in my life, when I decided, wouldn’t it be interesting to try to use fiction and entertainment as a way of getting people to understand medical, social, and biotechnical issues, to try to use entertainment. And the reason why I came to that thought was because having read a number of books about being a doctor and seeing a number of TV shows and movies about being doctors, that after I got into medical school, I realized that all those books that I had read, all those shows that I had
00:12:12
Speaker 3: watched, were not accurate.
00:12:16
Speaker 2: They missed the mark, and they were glorifying medicine, putting it on a pedestal. And yet it was very apparent to me right from day one that medicine in a
00:12:28
Speaker 3: lot of ways was going in the wrong direction.
00:12:31
Speaker 2: It was being influenced too much by business interests and moving away from its nineteenth-century roots of taking care of people. But since I had taken that opportunity to write that thesis of a hundred pages, I thought, “Well, hey, I did it once, why couldn’t I do it again? Why can’t I write a book about medicine.” But the only trouble was that I decided this in medical school, and I had no time in medical school. In fact, I had no time for anything in medical school. Medical school alone was obviously very time-consuming, but I also had to pay my way, so I had to have; I had multiple jobs, not only all through college, but also multiple jobs at medical school. When I first got to medical school, first thing I did was run around and look at all sorts of ads and stuff for jobs that I could somehow do along with being a medical student.
00:13:37
Speaker 3: And I found lots of jobs.
00:13:39
Speaker 2: I was the first one, I think, at Columbia, who wanted to work in the cafeteria in the dorm.
00:13:46
Speaker 3: I would serve the food.
00:13:49
Speaker 2: In the food line, and my fellow students were all coming in, and I remember feeling sorry for myself in some respects because I could see out through this little window that they were out there talking about the day and probably talking about what they had learned and exchanging ideas, and I was wishing I was out there. But I also tried to make it as much fun as I could. I would bring out two separate bowls of the same vegetable, and they, of course, would never look at the menu, and they say, “What’s tonight?” I’d say, “Well, we have some interesting things,” and I said, “We have some carrots here. We have two different types of carrots. We have truck-farm carrots and we have large-farming carrots.”
00:14:36
Speaker 3: And I said, “What’s the difference?” And I said, “Well, you know,” and I going to.
00:14:42
Speaker 2: Providing a medical student with a decision would stop the line. But it was away for me to entertain myself. But I did everything. I drew blood, I cleaned animal cages. All these jobs weren’t the best, but I took as many as I could. And it’s actually turns out that I was lucky that I had to work, because had I not had to work, like all my fellow medical students, I wouldn’t have had a certain opportunity that presented itself, and that was that the professor who was in charge of the lab in the hospital, he was a friend of Jacques Cousteau, and of course Jacques Cousteau was someone everybody knew; he was quite famous, et cetera. And Jacques Cousteau was about to do an experiment where he was having divers live underwater, and they were going to live at one-atmosphere pressure that is thirty-three feet down. But one of the things that you really had to know is physiologically what the blood gases are doing. He had no idea, and this professor told Jacques Cousteau that you really needed to know. So I got asked if I would be willing to go over to the South of France and set up a lab for Jacques Cousteau. And I thought about it for about five minutes. And I get one month off from medical school every year, and I’d have one month I could select as an elective. So I put these two months together during my summers as a medical student, and I spent the time in Monaco, where the Oceanographic Institute is, and then I flew over and put the lab together and then trained this French fellow exactly how to use the equipment, et cetera. I stayed then for the two months, and then I came back the next summer and the next summer and so, which was really interesting because I was this destitute medical student, and I was spending my summers on the Riviera.
00:17:04
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Robin Cook share his story, and my goodness, what a story it is! It should be a book all by itself. And by the way, Robin is the author of thirty-eight best-sellers that I’ve said before, and his latest is called ‘Night Shift,’ and go to bookstores, go to Amazon, and pick it up. It’s as good as anything he’s written. And by the way, he’s blessed time and again. Not just as little town. He grows up, but he goes to Wesley, and he’s working hard, and in comes this guy who knows Jacques Cousteau, and the next thing you know, he’s in Monaco doing tests on how human beings can thrive or not living underwater. When we come back, more of Robin Cook’s story here on Our American Stories, and we returned to Our American Stories, into Robin Cook’s story, and he’s sharing in the end his own, well, memoir. It’s his life story he’s sharing with us. Now let’s pick up where we last left off.
00:18:21
Speaker 2: Robin, and the counselor said, “Good choice, that’s fine,” you know, and everything else. And so we went ahead and applied and did all that sort of stuff, and I was accepted. But then I got invited to Wesleyan for their equivalent of their athletic—They don’t give athletic scholarships—but there was always a weekend where there was the home football game, and people who were on the football team had an opportunity to invite kids from
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