Review from Fact Sheet 5

Think of middle America spinning fast and out of control. Think of a Ramond Carver story immersed in alien radioactive ooze. Think of a trailer park Fahrenheit 451 or George Rowel on acid. Read Gregory Tozian’s short stories, or realize that you already are reading Gregory Tozian’s short stories. “One Queen Per Hive,” is the story of an ordinary woman caught up in her own white trash version of Serpent and the Rainbow. She agrees to keep bees for a couple’s small bee farm in exchange for a small stipend and room and board. The couple, however, are an uber Goth’s low-income nightmare: Every new moon they hold ritualistic ceremonies involving honey and chicken blood. Read the book to find out what they kept hidden in the jar on the altar and what the rather intense wife was wearing (you may not really want to know). The highlight, however, has to be “Shot in the Face,” a compelling, twisted detective tale. Detective Lazar becomes enthralled with a dead, faceless woman. He carries her panties around along with his badge. Read how he transcends himself in order to solve her mysterious, cult-related crime. You just don’t know what you’re going to get on your plate in Doll Head Eater. Tozian’s command of the language seems slightly warped, but that’s insipidly the point. The illustration (yes, those too!) of “Tozian’s Amerika” seems to sum everything up: There’s a martini glass, a revolver, a pack of cigarettes, and what appears to be a lottery ticket, all displayed within the frame of an old Zenith television set. What’s that tell you about Tozian’s sense of American culture? Weird, but not beyond entertainment. Price: $9.  (121 pages/KZ) Buy Doll Head Eater at amazon.com

THE ALOHA SHIRT

From the New York Times

July 8, 2001

Books in Brief: Nonfiction; Shirts of Paradise

By STEVEN HELLER

You don’t have to be Hawaiian to love Hawaiian shirts. You don’t even have to wear one to enjoy THE ALOHA SHIRT: Spirit of the Islands (Beyond Words, $45). Dale Hope and Gregory Tozian write, ”Aloha puts into one word the warm sense of greeting, love and playfulness for which Hawaii is well known,” a spirit evoked through the tropical colors and Polynesian patterns emblazoned on the classic Hawaiian or Aloha shirt. It began as a novelty souvenir, selling for 95 cents during the early 1930′s, when Hawaii was emerging as a tourist paradise. Soon the shirt grew into a major industry with its own master textile designers and printmakers. Profusely illustrated with photographs, drawings, advertisements, tags and labels, the book is a history of the shirt’s designers and manufacturers. The illustrations are delightful. Film posters and record covers feature celebrity poster boys like Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby (who lent his name to a shirt label) and Montgomery Clift, who in the 1953 movie ”From Here to Eternity” takes a fatal bullet in his lovely Aloha. There is also a section on the varieties of coconut buttons sewn onto vintage garments. But the real treat is reproductions of the shirts themselves, more than 100 of them, spread out like wallpaper swatches, with lyrical, weird or kitschy designs like palm trees, sailboats, flying fish, surfboards, exploding volcanoes, hula girls and night-blooming cereus patterns. One favorite, from 1959, is the ”Okole Maluna” or ”Bottoms Up.” Steven Heller

Review from The Washington Post

FIDEL’S CUBA — A Revolution in Pictures, By Osvaldo Salas and Roberto Salas, photographers; Gregory Tozian, writer (Thunder’s Mouth, $34.95) Among world leaders, perhaps only John F. Kennedy was as well-served by photography as Fidel Castro has been. Though Kennedy’s Camelot and Castro’s revolution were different in most regards, each embodied an essentially romantic image of youth, energy, idealism. And both found brilliant photographers to fix that image for future generations. In Castro’s case there was Alexander Korda, who took the most famous of all pictures of Che Guevara, as well as Osvaldo Salas and his son Roberto. Beginning with Castro’s visit to New York in 1955, the Cuban emigre Osvaldo and the American-born Roberto became part of his entourage — from the guerrilla days in the Sierra Maestra to the triumphant entry into Havana to the U.S. debacle at the Bay of Pigs. Roberto Salas provides captions for these gritty black and white images of a myth in the making. — NK

The Nontoxic CEO I ghost-wrote for/with CEO Mark Wysong of Dolphin Software. A business book. Successful. It went into a second printing.