Native state : a memoir / Tony Cohan

Located in Gloria Grant Room - special collection of San Miguel de Allende authors.

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.