The Nick Tosches Reader
by Nick Tosches
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Book Summary Information
Author: Nick ToschesEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-04
ISBN: 0306809699
Number of pages: 624
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780306809699
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Nick Tosches Reader
Book Review: A great, hard-bitten voice better represented in his full-scale books
Summary: 3 Stars
Nick Tosches has a hard voice to criticise, because it's based on a pose of having been to weirder places, seen weirder stuff and basically having lived a harder, darker and weirder life than the mere reader can possibly compete with. This is, in short, the voice of a true son of a certain and honourable school of journalism. It is not, however, the only way of talking about certain subjects. There are other ways, and other voices, some of them more persuasive than his.
For example: when Tosches was occasionally called upon by Rolling Stone to review records in the early 70s, he quite often regarded the assignment with such contempt that he didn't bother to listen to the record in question, but made up the review out of his own head. A case in point is his self-confessedly fictional review of Black Sabbath's 'Paranoid', one of the greatest albums in hard rock, but which Tosches couldn't be bothered to listen to because...well, because he was some kind of a cultural snob, plain and simple. His 'review' of it is included here, without even the merest hint of regret that he failed to spot how brilliant an album it is. I imagine that even now he regards it as beneath his notice.
Elsewhere, there is much writing that's high on octane but low on substance. There is little, in short, that lovers of music will want to reread, given Tosches' all-too-apparent but seldom openly stated contempt for the music he is mostly writing about. Much of the rest of the book is more or less entertaining, but little of it has the tragic depth of masterpieces such as his stunning Dean Martin biography 'Dino', or his equally scalding Sonny Liston bio 'Night Train', each of them heartbreaking chronicles of spiritual collapse. The main exception is the original article that gave rise to 'Night Train', which is arguably more perfectly concise and controlled than the actual book.
I have thought long and hard about why I find Tosches an ultimately depressing and dispiriting writer, and I think it has something to do with the fact that he has no real imagination. He has, to a phenomenal degree, a journalist's ability to think himself into his subject's world, and most journalists should envy how good he is at that, even if they mostly don't. But what he doesn't have is the visionary capacity to imagine a world other than this one; he respects it when it's possessed by established poets, but sneers at it when it's claimed by rock performers like Jim Morrison or Ozzy Osbourne, because Tosches is too cynical to believe that anything in rock'n'roll can carry that sort of ambition. (To be fair, Tosches would never be taken in by fakers like U2. But his dismissal of the overblown and pretentious but hugely entertaining Doors is as unimaginative as Greil Marcus preferring Randy Newman to Leonard Cohen.) Having said that, Tosches is not always intimidated into worshipping writers just because they're writers. As another reviewer pointed out, his full-on demolition job of Raymond Carver's poetry is one of the hilarious and gleeful ventures in literary criticism ever written.
Don't overestimate Nick Tosches; he is one of the two or three supreme chroniclers of American lowlife. But just because he understands disaster so well, doesn't mean he can tell you much about consummation.
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