Native State: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Tony Cohan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 9, 2003

A captivating, deeply affecting memoir chronicling a journey from a Hollywood childhood as the son of a fading show business figure to a bohemian life in Europe and back to his native state of California, where the author must face the man who had driven him away.


Summoned from abroad to attend to the ninety-four-year-old father he’s never been close to, writer and musician Tony Cohan finds himself reliving his own peripatetic life—a kaleidoscopic odyssey from California’s sunny postwar promise through the burnt end of the 1960s to the final days of the last century.
An engrossing investigation of memory and identity, love and desire, art and fate, Native State vividly portrays the author’s attempts to escape the confines of a celebrity-filled, alcoholic family through music, writing, and travel. His descent into the colorful milieus of musical and literary geniuses and lowlifes, divas and crooks, fortune tellers and culture gods in Paris, Tangier, London, Copenhagen, Barcelona, San Francisco, Kyoto, and Los Angeles coalesces into a distinctive, intimate depiction of a pivotal cultural era. Throughout, Cohan brilliantly interweaves and contrasts his past experiences with his present-day reflections on the universal youthful desire to flee home and family, and the simultaneous “undertow of origins” urging a return. The result is a work that combines unusually rich storytelling with extraordinary literary quality.
Poignant, elegantly crafted, and often funny, Native State is an indelible portrait of the artist as a young man, and—as son and dying father grope toward acceptance—a coming-to-terms with self, family, origins, and the elusive American idea of home.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cohan (On Mexican Time) was about to begin another travel book when he got word that his 94-year-old father was in his "ninth inning." Reluctantly, Cohan went to California for the death vigil. He'd never particularly liked his father, Phil, who at his career height had produced and directed the Jimmy Durante Show for CBS Radio, and who had monopolized the family spotlight relentlessly. Poring over the family scrapbooks, his dad's "memory palace," Tony relived his California boyhood, remembering his first drums, his first girlfriend, his mother's alcoholic binges, his father's interminable name-dropping and self-aggrandizing, and his own escape, after college, to Europe in the early 1960s. A bebop and cool jazz drummer, young Cohan played with some of the great expatriate musicians, including Dexter Gordon and Bud Powell. He knew Paul Bowles in Tangiers, met William Burroughs in Paris and took a lot of drugs. Returning to California, he soon took off for a Zen-inspired stint in Japan, but made it back to the States in time to get into the Ravi Shankar-inspired Indian music craze, the Big Sur scene, the Haight's "summer of love" and even some sessions with Jim Morrison. Cohan intercuts his own story, chapter by chapter, with updates on his father, who's finally "entering a state of grace." Filled with "improbable affection" for the dying man, Cohan finds "the less of him there is, the easier it is to like him." While Cohan's disarmingly honest life story would be colorful enough on its own, his memoir is enriched by his setting it against the story of his coming to terms with his father.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

"If the entry to the past was blocked by my parents, the way forward was wide open." And, yet, it's the past to which novelist Cohan returns in this memoir of a life lived on the run from his dysfunctional childhood. With his father reliving his days as producer of Jimmy Durante's radio show and his mother descending into an alcoholic haze, Cohan turned first to jazz and then to travel and writing, his peripatetic wanderings taking him to all the bohemian hot spots of the late 50s and 60s (Paris to Tangier to Kyoto). Juxtaposing his travels (and encounters with such luminaries as Dexter Gordon, Paul Bowles, and Jim Morrison) against his return to Los Angeles, where he awaits his 94-year-old father's death, Cohan keeps the reader turning pages, marveling at who this Zelig-like wanderer will cozy up to next. If his voice is a bit overweening and his prose a tad purple, the portrait of Hollywood in transition, as seen by a disaffected youth, has an almost mythical allure (Rebel with Too Many Causes meets Mommie and Daddy Dearest). Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Broadway; 1 edition (September 9, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767910206
• ISBN-13: 978-0767910200
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,127,365 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars pure gold, incorrigibly good, February 23, 2007

By 

Daniel Hamblin (Appalachia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Native State: A Memoir (Hardcover)

I'm quickly approaching the end of this book and already saddened by that fact. This has got to be one of the best books I've ever read. I'm principally a fan of non-fiction and this memoir has really touched me. If you fancy yourself as musical, nostalgic, cosmopolitan, idealist or perhaps, simply human in the least bit, you will undoubtedly find yourself attached to this book. Maybe I relate to it more than others will but the wanderlust, the music, the cast of shadowy figures, the distance (figurative and literal) between self and family all tug at my heart with a true, visceral immediacy. I found it extremely thought-provoking and wisdom-imparting. With jazz in my ears, misadventure on my mind, and a bittersweetness in my heart, I will be reading this one again and again.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The voyage of a generation, December 21, 2003

By 

Peter Nichols (Camden Maine) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Native State: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Tony Cohan, an incredibly gifted writer - his account of finding a new life in Mexico, 'On Mexican Time', is a superior contribution to the genre of literary travel memoir - has written a sort of early prequel to that book, a fascinating and heartrending story of one man's search for a meaningful life. This is played out in retrospect as he watches his father die in present day Los Angeles. He takes us back to his boyhood in the shadow of a belittling and domineering man, who shaped him for all that was to come. Young Cohan was an accomplished jazz drummer playing with greats like Dexter Gordon in Copenhagen - and pre-Ringo Beatles in Hamburg! - but he gave this up to follow a trickier path of self-expression as a writer. This led him through the early days of the counterculture that began in the late 1950s and flowered into the sex,drugs, rock and roll, Buddhism of the 60s. Cohan hung out with Paul Bowles in Morocco, Jim Morrison in LA, Burroughs in Paris. But this is much more than a name-dropping memoir. It's the paradigm voyage of a generation, and Cohan is its very best, most moving explicator. A great and moving book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A thoroughly engaging memoir, September 24, 2004

By 

Keith Nichols (Dallas, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Native State: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Tony Cohan's attempt to cope with the father who dominated his life has produced this splendid tale of escape into adventures literary, musical, and romantic in lands far and near. Mr. Cohan's abundant talents enabled him to find acceptance among musical and literary figures whose names will surely inspire threads of memory for readers of a certain age, say 60 and older. The memoir thus opens many more windows than would the ramblings of a less gifted protagonist.

The writing is more than equal to the images it is called on to create, and the influence of Mr. Cohan's father is delineated touchingly and understandably as it evolves from early days in New York and Hollywood up to the day of the elder Mr. Cohan's death.