Johnson remains a fashion pioneer, but her storytelling lacks the wit or polish necessary to make the book a success.
A memoir from the model whom fashion designer Halston once called "the new beauty ‘It Girl.’ ”
In August 1974, Johnson (True Beauty: Secrets of Radiant Beauty for Women of Every Age and Color, 1994) transformed the fashion industry as the first African-American to appear on the cover of American Vogue. That appearance, she writes, “left an enduring mark on the country, its view of beauty, and the meaning of beauty for decades to come.” However, as she notes, her life and career have been scarred by unwanted sexual advances that began at age 12 and that include a frightening 1986 incident with Bill Cosby (which the author has talked about publicly following other allegations against the comedian). Johnson’s observation that modeling was "an industry that I would find to be overflowing with a toxic mix of deceit, manipulation, abuse, and backstabbing" is echoed in the details of her unstable personal life, which has been marked by a string of codependent relationships with leeching, unfaithful, or drug-dealing men who robbed her of her livelihood and self-respect, jeopardized her health, and nearly ruined her professional reputation. When she finally recognized that her life had become a battle of "self-loathing and self-destruction,” she was able to start down the hard road toward redemption. Though she remains a sympathetic, candid narrator, Johnson recounts these doomed romances and other personal issues with repetitious lamentations, and she doesn’t seem to have gleaned much wisdom from the experiences. She also litters the book with clichés—on one page, she uses "bright and early," "best and brightest," "nearest and dearest," and "crystal clear.” These are not only distracting, but they hold readers at a distance and demonstrate the author’s lack of real insight.
Johnson remains a fashion pioneer, but her storytelling lacks the wit or polish necessary to make the book a success.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7441-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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
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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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