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THE WHOLE CATASTROPHE

Name: THE WHOLE CATASTROPHE
Author: George Soter
ISBN: 978-1-5075-4655-0

THE STORY OF MY (OFTEN TERRIFIC) LIFE

by George Soter Tom Soter ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 9, 2015

A charming but rather dull account of an adman’s life by his adoring son.

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.