by Michael Gross ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2003
One-note and strangely impersonal: the public Lauren when readers were looking for the private. (12 b&w photos)
Tepid, unauthorized biography of The King of Lifestyle Merchandizing.
“Ralphie had a thing for clothes,” writes Gross (Model, 1995, etc.) of young Ralph Lifshitz, who grew up in the Bronx during the 1940s and ’50s. The chapters about the youthful Lauren and the old Jewish neighborhood in which he spent his early years are the most interesting here. Ralph’s mother had his future mapped out as a rabbi, but instead he got into haberdashery (ties, that is), and his destiny was sealed. “I'm promoting a level of taste, a total feeling,” the designer now named Ralph Lauren declared of his ties in 1967. Sound familiar? So does much of this account, which suffers from the author’s lack of access to Lauren and most of his family, many of his associates, and a host of industry insiders who didn't want to alienate him. What readers get instead of interviews with those in the know is hardly surprising: rival designers dis Lauren and dismiss his ideas as knock-offs; the photographers Slim Aarons and Bruce Weber are credited with playing big roles in his image; he’s criticized for commodifying status and elevating traditional to immortal; his workplace is depicted as having an unsavory atmosphere (“in later years, employees would equate Lauren with cult leader Jim Jones”); and Gross writes little about his character more complimentary than: “The checklist of narcissistic personality traits seems to fit Lauren like a bespoke suit.” Nor is it exactly a shock that an ace image manipulator would also be an utter control freak. On the other hand, the author handles with clinical circumspection Lauren's admitted affair with model Kim Nye and views the company’s bottom line as more important than his less-than-elegant behavior as an employer, which “typically began with seduction and ended with abuse.”
One-note and strangely impersonal: the public Lauren when readers were looking for the private. (12 b&w photos)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-019904-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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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...
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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