A volume offers entertaining essays about New Yorkers, perfect for passing time on an uptown subway ride.
In his second collection of personal essays, Soter (Overheard on a Bus, 2014, etc.) explores topics ranging from Alzheimer’s to improvisational comedy.
Soter is a native New Yorker—raised in a Greek-American family in an apartment on the Upper West Side’s Riverside Drive in the 1960s—and has spent a lifetime observing the city’s inhabitants and their lives. In this collection, he continues to provide readers with short essays based on these experiences. Soter’s background is in newspaper and magazine writing (for publications such as the New York Observer and Entertainment Weekly) and teaching improv comedy classes, and his witty, breezy essay style reflects this. Some of his pieces fit into the feuilleton tradition of clever cultural pieces; others would not be out of place in the New York Times’ “Lives” or “Metropolitan Diary” sections. Reading Soter’s essays is like spending an afternoon with an uncle at a Manhattan diner, drinking coffee and savoring stories the listener has probably heard before but still finds enjoyable. While Soter’s essays might not be rigorous, they are generally engaging and satisfying. If they favor the quick and cute over the analytical or penetrating, it is by design. “Sentimental?” Soter writes, defiantly. “Mawkish? Self-involved? I plead guilty to all charges. That’s who I am. Live with it.” While there is certainly shared subject matter between the author’s previous and current essay volumes, the latter is at times a bit more somber and nostalgic. There are fewer discussions of pop-culture obsessions and celebrity encounters and more meditations on loss and the passage of time. He writes of his parents’ illnesses and the death of a favorite great uncle, of first jobs and childhood friends. Throughout, though, Soter remains committed to the guiding philosophy he states at the book’s beginning: “When I think of the vagaries of life—and its cruelties—I often think of the comment my first improv teacher once made: ‘Life is a big joke—it only hurts if you don’t laugh.’ ” The illustrated book provides over 100 photographs and reproductions of print ephemera.
A volume offers entertaining essays about New Yorkers, perfect for passing time on an uptown subway ride.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5027-1335-3
Page Count: 206
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
