This unauthorized biography is part riveting empire-building chronicle, part tiresome litany of sexcapades. Gaines has trod much of this territory before in Simply Halston (1991); Churcher is a former Wall Street Journal reporter. Born to a relatively affluent Bronx family, Klein took a job with a Seventh Avenue coat manufacturer, married a local girl, had a baby, and moved to Queens. But when the president of Bonwit Teller fell for a line of Calvin-designed coats and suits, all that changed. Bonwit's hyped him, and other stores lined up to get in on the act. Klein shed his wife and, in the 70's, remade himself into a regular on the Studio 54 and Fire Island scenes, launching a string of affairs with men and women. His daughter was kidnapped but released unharmed. Blue jean sales careened off the charts, helped by those ``Nothing comes between me and my Calvins'' ads featuring Brooke Shields. Klein went on to further success with both underwear and his fragrance, Obsession. As the world around him was decimated by AIDS, Klein edged out of the sex-and-drugs fast lane, marrying Kelly Rector, a design assistant in his studio. Ironically, the machinations of the Klein empire—the advertising coups, the disastrous decisions (i.e., the selection of the first Klein fragrance, which was universally disliked), the high-strung temperaments, the titanic personality clashes—make for far more scintillating reading than the exhaustive attempts to exhume every detail of the designer's sexual history. Occasional excessive biographic license (``A chill ran up Calvin's spine'') subtracts credibility. In all: part solid business reporting, part gratuitous heavy breathing. (First printing of 100,000)
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55972-235-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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