Soho: The Rise and Fall of an Artist's Colony

Rating:
Summary: Rambling
Review: Author Kostelanetz was a long-time Soho resident and writes a personal account about the history of Soho as an artist's neighborhood. The most interesting parts of the book are the beginning in which he describes Soho's slow transformation from a daytime industrial district into the thriving artist colony it was to become. I lived in lower Manhattan for much of the same period and can recall many of the people and places he describes.

The problem I have with this book is that there is no story here. The chapters appear to be loosley based on certain themes, although even those are hard to discern at times. There's nothing chronological; it's just a rambling collection of reminiscences with no cohesion or thread to hold it together or make it engaging. The author's nostalgic point of view (criticized in the Publisher's Weekly review above) would be fine if he stayed with it and honed in on it; but as is, it's just an uneven mish-mash of nostalgia and memories weaving in and out of splatterings of facts, with no order or trajectory. I have to honestly say I only got halfway through this book, so it may have improved by the end. But it just wasn't worth it for me to force myself through what felt like literary packing peanuts when there's so much other good stuff out there to read.

It needn't be this way. For example, Legs McNeil authored an excellent history of punk rock taking place mostly in New York at about the same time as this book (see "Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk" elsewhere on Amazon.com). The latter shows that a recent period of New York history can be conveyed in oral remembrances in a way that both informs and captivates the reader.