Funny and informative, with the kick of a dry martini.
Maas (Adventures of an Advertising Woman, 1987, etc.) looks back on her days as a pioneering female copywriter and ad executive in the heady ’60s and ’70s, dishing on the profligate behavior characteristic of the industry at that time as dramatized by the TV series Mad Men.
The author frequently references that show’s authenticity (and occasional infelicities) as she remembers the institutional sexism and hard-partying ethos of the ad business in those years, but her real brief is to reflect on the special challenges facing women whose professional success often came at the expense of feeling fulfilled as wives and mothers. Maas was a star at Ogilvy and Mather, rising from copywriter to creative director and ultimately establishing her own firm (she would oversee the iconic “I Love New York” campaign of the mid ’70s), but her success was tempered by guilt over neglecting her young daughters and fraught with what today could only be described as gross sexual harassment. The author writes without bitterness about these difficulties, managing to convey the fun and excitement of the era and cheekily recounting tales of wild affairs and stylish dissolution. She has interesting observations about the “creative revolution” that swept the industry during her heyday and provides juicy anecdotes about such figures as advertising legend David Ogilvy and hotel magnate Leona Helmsley (with whom she had a brief and disastrous professional entanglement). Maas’ memoir will likely not have the impact of her classic 1977 tome How to Advertise (co-written with Kenneth Roman), but this slight volume is a bracing and consistently engaging look at the realities behind the fetishized nostalgia of Mad Men.
Funny and informative, with the kick of a dry martini.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-64023-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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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