A richly detailed and well-researched biography of a fashion icon.
Intelligent account of the life and accomplishments of legendary Vogue editor-in chief, Diana Vreeland (1903–1989).
Vreeland was one of the 20th century’s greatest arbiters of style and fashion. Stuart (Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and a Mother in the Gilded Age, 2007) examines the people and events that made Vreeland into the fabulously compelling figure she became. The child of wealthy parents, Vreeland grew up with one foot in Belle Epoque Paris and the other in New York high society. Yet her childhood and early adolescence were far from idyllic. From a young age, she "internalized a sense of herself as ugly”; a difficult relationship with a beautiful but cruel and narcissistic mother only compounded her woes. Vreeland found solace by developing a keen aesthetic sense in tandem with a unique vision for who she wanted to be. By the time she was 16, she had successfully transformed herself into what she called "the Girl": a popular, trendsetting young woman who lived for beauty and art. At 22 and contrary to all expectation, she married "an astonishingly handsome husband" and moved to London where, within a few short years, she became what Vogue would call "one of the 'European highlights of chic.’ ” She eventually caught the eye of magazine editor Carmel Snow, who hired Vreeland to work alongside her at Harper's Bazaar. In the 25 years she was associated with the magazine, Vreeland helped transform it into the most dynamically innovative purveyor of fashion in the United States. But as Stuart shows, it was only later, as editor-in-chief of Vogue and then as a consultant for the Costume Institute at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, that Vreeland was fully able to assert her guiding vision: that fantasy and imagination were the only means by which an individual could find "release from the banality of the world.”
A richly detailed and well-researched biography of a fashion icon.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-169174-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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