A review by michaelgardner
Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman's World by Tosh Berman

3.0

There is something enchanting when reading into another time and place, romantically experiencing an elsewhere, and Tosh Berman captures moments of this in slight chapters; each focused on a particular person, event, or happening. Telling the story of one's life, specifically their upbringing when compounded by the relationship to an artist-parent seminally famous (see what I did there?), cannot be an easy project. Tosh allows for this in the structure he employs, smartly, letting the child's memories bloom as they mature and comprehend more. It is in the final chapters however, the teen years, where the sharing of favorite cassette tapes, rock bands he would rather dismiss, and sexual positions enjoyed in his bedroom-garage that we lose touch with the sepia-colored, dusty, and precious world we first wandered around in at the start of this book, and in turn wonder about Wallace and consider what we haven't been told. There is a real history here that Tosh experienced first hand, and this enables greater appreciation for the making of an art not only for its precedent, but as situationally important. One wishes Topanga Canyon still held the same magic and mess it once did, and in turn breathe the air of those incredible people who ventured and created within its remoteness.