Reviews of Herbert Gold Novels and Stories
Herbert Gold Biographical Sketch
Herbert Gold bibliography and more reviews
Presentation of the Ohioana 1957 Book Award for Fiction to Herbert Gold for The Man Who Was Not With It, Atlantic-Little
Brown, 1965
The seamy world of a travelling carnival is the unlikely surroundings in which a
sensitive youth acquires responsibility and learns what true love can be. It is a measure of
Herbert Gold's skill that this implausible happening is made to seem real.
His impressionistic stylized prose very successfully catches the brittle sharp
garish quality of a carnival. The squalid grimy aspects are conveyed without smirching the love of
Bud Williams for Joy, the daughter of the mittcamp (fortune-telling) "artist."
As one of the Ohioana judges wrote of it, "It's a solid story, if you will, but sensitively
observed, flavorful, consistently motivated, skillfully paced."
The author himself said of the book, "If the theme of a novel could be given in a word,
that of this one might be: An informed will gives spiritual health; to make sense in the world
we must feel, know and desire coherently."
Herbert Gold was born March 9, 1924, in Cleveland and makes his home in Detroit.
At the present time he is travelling on a Guggenheim Fellowship for the year 1957-1958.
In years past he has studied in France and other parts of Europe on a Fulbright Fellowship and,
on a State Department grant, worked in Haiti where most of The Man Who Was Not With It was written.
Among his other activities: he was a soldier in Army Military Intelligence, the night manager of a hotel,
a treasure hunter in northern Haiti. For a year he hitch-hiked about the United States. In Georgia
he was arrested for "unlawful refusal to work" and picked the Sheriff's peaches.
He has written many stories and articles and two other novels: Birth of a Hero (Viking, 1951) and
The Prospect Before Us (World, 1954).
Fathers: A Novel by Herbert Gold. Primus/Donald I. Fine, 1991. 308pp pb $12.95
Ohioana Quarterly Summer 1992
In this "fictional" biography, Herbert Gold recounts the story of his father's immigration to
America, survival and ultimate success. Sam Gold travels from Kamenets-Podolsk, Poland, to America
to escape the restrictive, cruel, pogrom-filled land of his parents and seek his fortune. In time,
Sam is able to bring his brothers and sisters to this country. After his parents are killed during a
bombing of their tiny village in 1914, Gold achieves complete separation from the old country.
He begins to wander to other places, including Canton and Cleveland, Ohio. The story is full of
anecdotes from his life and his struggle to become an American, quickly shedding his Jewishness and
slowly, his foreign ways.
The situations and tales Herbert Gold describes are similar to the stories of many
immigrants, and the acclimating of all immigrants, he brings to life the trial of our fathers in
the early decades of this century.
This is a welcome re-issue of one of Cleveland-born Herbert Gold's earlier novels.
Reviewer: Miriam Kahn
Swiftie the Magician by Herbert Gold. McGraw-Hill. 1974. 168pp. $6.95
Ohioana Quarterly Summer 1975
Herbert Gold, formerly of Cleveland, now makes his home in San Francisco
and personally knows the atmosphere of this new novel, his ninth.
In the story, a television writer and filmmaker named Frank Curtis has a
strong belief that money and love can solve everything. He strives to fulfill his dream of
making a film masterpiece. Three women, each typically Hollywood, passionately give their hearts to Frank -
and thereby they hinder him in his career.
The author evokes the mad, mad world of Hollywood, the Sunset Strip and its excesses of
behavior, ten-minute starlets, ambitions gone awry, and freakish people.
Like the French novelist, Stendhal, these characters seem to be asking, "Great Almighty - why am I me?"
Waiting For Cordelia by Herbert Gold. Arbor House, 1977. 234pp. $8.95
Ohioana Quarterly Summer 1977
Cleveland-born novelist Herbert Gold now lives in San Francisco, the scene of this fast-moving comedy battle
between heroine Cordelia, a prostitute with a heart of gold, and a female politico who homes to become the
first woman mayor of the city.
The narrator of the story, a professor--like author Gold, who has taught at Harvard, Cornell,
Stanford, and the University of California - speaks in a parody of private-eye style ("Cody felt his
feet saying Move. He got up, leaving the bourbon for the cats to lick") mixed with a parody of
academic lingo ("Looking for my thesis, I found it at last in the social consequences of non-violent crime.)
Light, raunchy reading to occupy a dull hour or two, the book is probably most
important as the basis for a film in which, it is reported, Lily Tomlin will play Cordelia.
He/She by Herbert Gold. Arbor House. 1980. 213pp. $9.95
Ohioana Quarterly Spring 1981
Gold, who has been through divorce himself, in this novel anatomizes the breakup of a marriage.
He makes both partners sympathetic, so that the reader is almost as torn as they are. By calling them only He and She he
generalizes the story, yet the characters emerge as real, well-rounded people. Being intelligent and basically good, they never reach
extremes of hatred for each other - which in many ways would make the situation easier - though they do feel anger and most of the other emotions.
At the end they achieve resolution of a sort. This could be grim reading, but Gold's skill is great; once you begin the story
your interest in the characters and their eventual fates will hold you till the end.
Mister White Eyes by Herbert Gold. Arbor House. 1984. 268pp. $12.95
Ohioan Quarterly Summer 1985
A battle-scarred veteran of love and work, middle-aged New York journalist Ralph Merian, twice divorced,
has spent his life in far off places rather than close to himself: "Love and the need to join with another
was the thing he had overcome; he worked instead." Now his complacency is threatened by a woman, with
whom he is falling in love; and by his younger brother Chaz, a suicidal psychotic who seeks an impossible reconciliation.
Susan, a British linguist Merian met in Haiti, moves to New York and he needs to define
his feelings for her. Chaz, whom Merian visits in San Francisco, is sinking into his illness,
obsessed with a broken radio he has been trying to fix for years, a metaphor for the brothers' failure of
communication. Battling with his hopes and fears in these two important relationships, Merian
also becomes involved with Hawkfeather, a cynical young Apache he meets while covering a story on the
Indian Nation in Arizona, and is forced into confronting the distance he keeps with himself.
More than a routine mid-life crisis novel, Mister White Eyes is an artful portrait of
an aging man struggling to rearrange his world. A career of achievement ("sixteen wars and revolutions")
has left him alone and disconnected, a witness to his life instead of a participant in it. Can
Merian find balance and redemption through loving Susan and making peace with his brother?
Some characters are sketchy and Gold's style is at times as jarringly disconnected as his hero,
but this is a compelling contemporary story. Critically acclaimed for earlier works like Salt and Fathers,
Herbert Gold was born in Cleveland. Mister White Eyes is his fifteenth novel.
Reviewer: Janet Wiehe
The Young Prince and the Magic Cone by Herbert Gold. Doubleday. 68pp. $3.95
Ohioana Quarterly Winter 1973
Herbert Gold, formerly of Cleveland and now a resident of San Francisco, is well known as the author of 12 successful books.
Now he has written this story for children about an ingenious little Prince who wishes to be loved by everyone.
This proves to be extremely difficult for the titled child.
Then Mr. Gold introduces some ice cream, a bit of magic, a verso or three and, lo and behold, the
Prince has made a very good friend and is loved by many.
As a bit of happy fantasy, this illustrated story has definite appeal.
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