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by Paula Kurman (Author)
Paula Kurman shares her forty-year love story with baseball legend Jim Bouton in her heartfelt memoir, The Cool of the Evening.
"I am among the most fortunate of women. I loved Jim Bouton and was well and truly loved by him for more than four decades. It doesn't get any better than that." They met on October 15, 1977, at Bloomingdale's department store in Hackensack, New Jersey. Jim Bouton, Major League pitcher, twenty-one game winner for the New York Yankees, and author of the iconic exposé Ball Four, and Dr. Paula Kurman, professor of interpersonal communication at Hunter College. It was love at first sight. Paula knew absolutely nothing about baseball when they met, or any other sport for that matter. And Jim had never heard of interpersonal communication, but he thought reading nonverbal behavior was creepy. Yet despite their obvious differences, Paula and Jim were soulmates. Together they created a partnership of equals that was greater than the sum of their parts. It lasted forty-two years. Laced through with humor, passion, and intelligence, Paula shares the intimacy and adventures of their married life through the blending of families, moving from suburban New Jersey to rural Massachusetts, where they built a home on top of a hill deep in the wilderness of the Berkshires, the shattering blow of the death of a daughter, the healing of stonework and ballroom dancing--and finally, the devastating long-term illness that took Jim's life in the summer of 2019. Through it all, to the very end, Paula and Jim's passionate love for each other grew and deepened. The Cool of the Evening is a celebration of their remarkable relationship.Author Biography
Paula Kurman, Ph.D., began her life as a child actress, and was one of the first graduates of the High School of Performing Arts. She later developed a theater program for troubled adolescents and went on to earn her doctorate from Columbia University in 1975, with a specialty in nonverbal communication. She was a member of the faculty at Hunter College for 10 years, then a corporate consultant, seminar leader, and keynote speaker for two decades. Although she has written almost 100 personal essays for magazines, at the age of 86, this is Kurman's first published book--the one she promised her husband she would write if she had the misfortune to outlive him. Her six grandchildren are very proud.
