Norman Cousins was an American political journalist, author, professor, and world peace advocate.
21 Facts About Norman Cousins
2.
Norman Cousins attended Theodore Roosevelt High School in the Bronx, New York City, graduating on February 3,1933.
3.
Norman Cousins edited the high school paper, "The Square Deal," where his editing abilities were already in evidence.
4.
Norman Cousins received a bachelor's degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City.
5.
Norman Cousins joined the staff of the New York Evening Post in 1934, and in 1935 was hired by Current History as a book critic.
6.
Norman Cousins later ascended to the position of managing editor.
7.
Norman Cousins befriended the staff of the Saturday Review of Literature, which had its offices in the same building, and by 1940, joined the staff of that publication as well.
8.
Norman Cousins was named editor-in-chief in 1942, a position he would hold until 1972.
9.
Norman Cousins joined the University of California, Los Angeles faculty in 1978 and became an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences.
10.
Politically, Norman Cousins was a tireless advocate of liberal causes, such as nuclear disarmament and world peace, which he promoted through his writings in Saturday Review.
11.
Norman Cousins rushed to get it published the next day in the Review, and the response was considerable, as it was reprinted in newspapers around the country and enlarged into a book that was reprinted in different languages.
12.
Norman Cousins served as president of the World Federalist Association and chairman of the Committee for Sane Nuclear Policy, which in the 1950s warned that the world was bound for a nuclear holocaust if the threat of the nuclear arms race was not stopped.
13.
Norman Cousins was awarded the Eleanor Roosevelt Peace Award in 1963, the Family Man of the Year Award in 1968, the United Nations Peace Medal in 1971, and the Niwano Peace Prize and the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism, both in 1990.
14.
Norman Cousins did research on the biochemistry of human emotions, which he long believed were the key to human beings' success in fighting illness.
15.
Norman Cousins took massive intravenous doses of Vitamin C and had self-induced bouts of laughter brought on by films of the television show Candid Camera and by various comic films.
16.
Norman Cousins had always been an optimist, known for his kindness to others, and his robust love of life itself.
17.
Norman Cousins wrote a collection of best-selling non-fiction books on illness and healing, as well as a 1980 autobiographical memoir, Human Options: An Autobiographical Notebook.
18.
Norman Cousins was portrayed by actor Ed Asner in a 1984 television movie, Anatomy of an Illness, which was based on Norman Cousins's 1979 book Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing.
19.
Norman Cousins was not pleased with the commercial nature of the movie, nor with Hollywood's sensationalistic exaggerations of his experience.
20.
Norman Cousins died of heart failure on November 30,1990, in Los Angeles, having survived years longer than his doctors predicted: 10 years after his first heart attack, 26 years after his collagen illness, and 36 years after his doctors first diagnosed his heart disease.
21.
Norman Cousins is survived by his children and by 26 grandchildren and is buried at the Mt.