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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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