A compilation that’s as diverse and surprising as life on a New York City block.
In his most recent collection of essays, Soter (Driving Me Crazy, 2015, etc.) explores a wide range of personal and cultural experiences.
The author, a lifelong New Yorker, returns with another installment of his collected works. He returns to favorite topics, such as reminiscences of his Greek-American family, and also takes on other issues, such as his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. In the introduction, he compares his ongoing project to the clip books that he kept in the early days of his writing career, in which he gathered every piece of his published journalism. Here, he gathers together published and unpublished work, and his topics range across his many interests, including the cats that he’s owned over the years, his encounters with cyclists on the streets of New York City, his love life, and his pop-culture obsessions, such as the 1960s television program Combat!. The pieces differ not only in content, but in form and structure as well. There are witty one-pagers about life in the big city; a lengthier piece about some of the more memorable students in Soter’s improvisational comedy classes; an interview-based article about co-op doormen; a memorial poem for Soter’s mother; and even a sci-fi story. Although the author’s sharp, journalistic prose is consistent throughout, the four-decade span of the content naturally makes some pieces feel fresher than others. The author is at his best when describing characters he’s met, such as an overly enthusiastic fan of Soter and his pal’s homemade films and an old-school London taxi driver. Some readers will wish that the collection was more cohesive, though; as it is, this volume could easily have been two separate books—one of personal memoir and another of cultural journalism. However, other readers will delight in the surprise of stumbling from a rumination on childhood birthdays to an unpublished, intimate interview with the legendary comedian John Cleese (of Monty Python fame) within a few pages. In any case, nearly everyone will find something of interest in this volume, which also includes more than 100 black-and-white images, including photographs and print ephemera.
A compilation that’s as diverse and surprising as life on a New York City block.Pub Date: July 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5333-7486-8
Page Count: 242
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
