An often wild and always engaging autobiography.
Gosh recollects a successful career as a songwriter and his long love affair with marijuana in this debut memoir.
The author was born in 1936 in Pennsylvania and began piano lessons when he was 6 years old. At the age of 18, he had his first experience of truly getting high from smoking marijuana, which he says helped him to perform music that seemed to possess an “otherworldly character.” Out of these early experiences sprang the twin themes of Gosh’s life and of this memoir: a devotion to the salutary benefits of marijuana use—he later started ingesting it via homemade baked goods instead of smoking it—and the enthusiastic pursuit of musical creativity. These ultimately dovetailed for the author, as he says that the use of marijuana fuels his artistic imagination and offers him an atheistic spirituality: “I get many great hook ideas…under the influence of marijuana,” he writes. “It may sound far-fetched, but maybe I’m communing in some way with the frequency waves of the universe.” Gosh chronicles his career through a series of brief vignettes rather than in a thorough, linear history. The result is an unconventional memoir whose chapters can easily be read nonsequentially. After getting his start playing in New York City piano bars, Gosh partnered with the famed lyricist Sammy Cahn, and from there, his career took off; he toured with Paul Anka, opened for Barbra Streisand, and was awarded a gold record for “A Little Bit More,” a song that became an international hit in 1976 for the band Dr. Hook. Gosh’s remembrance is delightfully unpretentious, which is an especially endearing quality given his considerable talent and accomplishments. His prose is as informally charming as the book’s structure is free-wheeling—as if the reader is being regaled with stories over a quiet drink (or, perhaps more fittingly, a shared joint). He discusses a wide range of personal and intellectual issues—the two seem inextricably intertwined here—including the reasons why he became a “staunch atheist,” the state of his marriage, and his adventures buying rare books and contemporary art. The memoir is spangled with tantalizing tales about the musical greats that Gosh met or worked with, such as Frank Sinatra, Björk, and Tony Bennett. However, his advocacy for marijuana can feel a touch strident at times. Also, his descriptions of his creative experiences after consuming drugs often rely on shopworn phrases that are more familiar than they are illustrative; for example, regarding an early 1980s peyote experience, he writes, “I felt like I was in outer space and one with the universe. I seemed to understand the reason for everything.” Nevertheless, the book’s virtues outweigh these minor vices. For readers interested in the craft of songwriting, Gosh’s lucid account of how he composes a song will be enough to justify the book’s purchase. Overall, the author has lived a rich, fascinating life—personally, artistically, and professionally—and he thoughtfully conveys the highlights in this enjoyable work.
An often wild and always engaging autobiography.Pub Date: April 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-75669-0
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Bygosh Music Corporation
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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