A richly detailed and well-researched biography of a fashion icon.
Intelligent account of the life and accomplishments of legendary Vogue editor-in chief, Diana Vreeland (1903–1989).
Vreeland was one of the 20th century’s greatest arbiters of style and fashion. Stuart (Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and a Mother in the Gilded Age, 2007) examines the people and events that made Vreeland into the fabulously compelling figure she became. The child of wealthy parents, Vreeland grew up with one foot in Belle Epoque Paris and the other in New York high society. Yet her childhood and early adolescence were far from idyllic. From a young age, she "internalized a sense of herself as ugly”; a difficult relationship with a beautiful but cruel and narcissistic mother only compounded her woes. Vreeland found solace by developing a keen aesthetic sense in tandem with a unique vision for who she wanted to be. By the time she was 16, she had successfully transformed herself into what she called "the Girl": a popular, trendsetting young woman who lived for beauty and art. At 22 and contrary to all expectation, she married "an astonishingly handsome husband" and moved to London where, within a few short years, she became what Vogue would call "one of the 'European highlights of chic.’ ” She eventually caught the eye of magazine editor Carmel Snow, who hired Vreeland to work alongside her at Harper's Bazaar. In the 25 years she was associated with the magazine, Vreeland helped transform it into the most dynamically innovative purveyor of fashion in the United States. But as Stuart shows, it was only later, as editor-in-chief of Vogue and then as a consultant for the Costume Institute at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, that Vreeland was fully able to assert her guiding vision: that fantasy and imagination were the only means by which an individual could find "release from the banality of the world.”
A richly detailed and well-researched biography of a fashion icon.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-169174-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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