The San Francisco Examiner: “Cohan writes poetically and evocatively about the world around him. He is enchanted by color, by sound, by language. He is mesmerized by a new perception of time. Through it all, he develops a comfort with mystery. Mystery, he finds, is not something to be solved but something to be savored. With this understanding comes acceptance Cohan’s and his neighbors’. And we’ve gotten much more than a story about a charming Mexican town.”
The Boston Globe: “Cohan describes life in Mexico as ‘intimate, voluptuous, sense-driven,’ a phrase that also describes On Mexican Time.”
Times Literary Supplement: “The most memorable aspects of the book are the psychological ones. In Mexico, Cohan says, ‘you laugh until the tears take over.’ This book gets to the heart of a country remarkably difficult to penetrate.”
Albuquerque Sunday Journal: “One of those rare, delightful books that allows the reader to enter the author’s mind and float effortlessly from place to place and thought to thought.”
The Seattle Weekly: “…an exemplary memoir that starts with ‘California as suspect, ersatz Eden, needful of unmasking’ and opens out into the rest of the world, detailing in exceedingly elegant prose the growth of a young man with a gift for ‘peeling away the surface of life around us, searching for a new, ugly beauty.’ The author has carefully pitched his tale, balancing it with humor and the knowledge that his life amounts to much more than any one anecdote could communicate (there are wonderfully observed passages about his epiphanic period playing drums in the '50s and '60s), and how much each little story in anyone's life feeds from, and into, every larger tale.” more...
The Los Angeles Times: “A limpid and beautifully elegiac memoir. Drumming is this book's electric heart, the instrument, in every sense, of Tony Cohan’s escape into travel and eros and hope. But more than just leading him into a demimonde of hipsters, nomad girls and visionaries, drumming seems to lie behind the syncopation that gives the book its compelling structure. In Native State Cohan has given us a small classic of California retrospection that begins, in its wistful clarity, to explain us to ourselves.” more...
The Christian Science Monitor: “A series of vivid and engaging accounts. This is about a different Mexico, one Cohan calls ‘permanently exotic’. If you like discoveries - of both the archeological and personal sort - and those mixed with deeper contemplations on such questions as why we travel or what globalization means for one’s identity, then Mexican Days offers a basket of riches.” more...
The Los Angeles Times: “A gorgeous aimlessness permeates Mexican Days. It is this sense of unneatness, of I’s not dotted and T’s not crossed, that carries the narrative so beautifully. The phrase ‘magical travel realism’ keeps springing to mind. Cohan can make a reader smell the orchids and coffee, feel the mist and shrouds of jungle fog. Mexican Days is a standout.” more...
Santa Barbara News Press: "It is Tony Cohan in search of himself that is often the most engaging here. A conscious and conscientious traveler, he sees through the eyes of a seeking visitor. He folds in ancient and contemporary history, introduces us to his friends and colleagues, and takes us to out of the way and classic destinations. But the discoveries are always about human nature, about what we are willing to risk and what we are willing to enjoy."
The New York Times: “Immensely knowledgeable about its field, full of action, yet sensitive and believable at the same time. A fine piece of work.”
The Los Angeles Times: “The characters reveal warmth; even the assassins and chiselers have breakable hearts. The writer’s equivalent to what musicians used to call ‘soul’ is what makes this book sing.”