A handsome production, one that just might touch off a Truex revival.
A capably written, well-illustrated life of a doyen of American interior design.
Although the subtitle is a tad too grand, as subtitles often are, Lewis, himself an interior designer, does a good job of showing how influential Van Day Truex (1904–79) once was as both a merchant and arbiter of taste. Lewis treats Truex’s life as a somewhat unlikely American success story: born on the frontier, the son of a crusty employee of then-local dry-goods merchant J.C. Penney, Truex was shunned by his own family for his effeminate manner but encouraged by well-meaning relatives and teachers (and even Penney) to develop his artistic talents. This meant moving to New York, where Truex quickly distinguished himself as a student of the aesthete Frank Alvah Parsons. After winning a scholarship to study in Paris, Truex soon moved comfortably in a circle that included expatriate intellectuals, members of the nobility, and artists from all over the world. Truex took Parsons’s command “to produce art work in which one has an idea to sell” seriously, and he enjoyed considerable success as a commercial artist, reaching the pinnacle of his career as the chief designer for Tiffany & Co. In one of the many telling anecdotes here, Lewis relates how Truex settled a heated discussion among executives over how the company’s playing cards should look by producing a pen and quietly sketching a repeated line of hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds, leaving room in the center for a personalized monogram; the design remains on Tiffany cards half a century later. It helps, Lewis admits, that Truex enjoyed the support of Tiffany president Walter Hoving, who signed off on almost everything Truex did—including commissioning Andy Warhol to design a line of Christmas cards.
A handsome production, one that just might touch off a Truex revival.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-03024-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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