A charming but rather dull account of an adman’s life by his adoring son.
Soter (You Should Get A Cat, 2016, etc.) eulogizes his father, the adman and retailer George Soter, in this biography.
“I got into advertising because I didn’t know what else I could do,” remembers George Soter decades after the fact, when the popularity of the TV show Mad Men had renewed the public’s interest in the era. Born to Greek immigrants in Chicago in 1924, George Soter rose to prominence in the advertising industry for his popular 1950s Renault “Le Car Hot” campaign. He later duplicated that success in the realm of retail by opening Greek Island Ltd., a chic Manhattan boutique specializing in Greek products and artifacts whose clientele included Katharine Hepburn, Paul Newman, and Faye Dunaway. In addition to these two career highlights, the book covers Soter’s personal life, from his childhood in Chicago to his service in the Signal Corps during World War II to his ill-fated attempts to place a cartoon in the New Yorker. The narrative concentrates on the two great passions of Soter’s life: his ever expanding family and the landscape of his ancestral Greece: “He was happiest of all on vacation in Greece: the sea, the sun, the afternoon lunches, the relatives, the whole catastrophe.” Soter’s son Tom Soter is the primary author, although the book is narrated mostly from the perspective of George Soter, who recorded audio interviews with Tom that served as the basis of the work. Two other sons, Nick and Peter, each provide brief introductions, and numerous family photos appear throughout the text. The book, which often waxes reverential, gives interesting accounts of the various milieus through which George Soter passed—and makes sure to note the famous people whose paths his happened to cross—but would be of primary interest to family members.
A charming but rather dull account of an adman’s life by his adoring son.Pub Date: April 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5075-4655-0
Page Count: 308
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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