Wilson ably and unsparingly portrays the heady, competitive, solipsistic world that celebrated, and ultimately doomed,...
The astonishing creations and tormented life of British fashion designer Alexander McQueen (1969-2010).
During his 18-year career, McQueen rose to the pinnacle of international couture, mounting shows that were notably surreal, shocking, and outrageous. Journalist Wilson (Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted, 2013, etc.), draws on interviews with the designer’s friends, family, lovers, and co-workers, as well as published sources, to produce a richly detailed life of a man hailed as a genius whose suicide shocked the fashion world. Sexually abused as a child and bullied by classmates because he was gay, McQueen came to the fashion industry defiant and rebellious. After serving as an apprentice to Savile Row tailors, he enrolled at the respected Central Saint Martins art school, culminating his degree with a collection called “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims.” Wealthy fashionista Isabella Blow was in the audience, mesmerized by McQueen’s audacity. A black coat with blood-red lining containing human hair seemed to her “the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” She became a champion and patron of a man who determinedly honed his image as a misfit. Wearing low-slung jeans and old lumberjack shirts, he was, as Plum Sykes said, “smelly and sweaty and grubby,” and—until he underwent gastric band surgery—overweight. Insecure, emotionally fragile, and yearning for romance, he failed to sustain relationships; one man after another left him, overwhelmed by his jealousy, paranoia, and need to control. Drugs and alcohol became his defense against loneliness and stress, and his cocaine addiction intensified after he became creative director at Givenchy, contracted to produce six shows yearly. Each, one boyfriend noted, could not be just “a normal catwalk show, it had to be amazing.” The author details not only the designer’s “stunningly beautiful and deeply unsettling” fashions, but also what McQueen and everyone else wore on every occasion.
Wilson ably and unsparingly portrays the heady, competitive, solipsistic world that celebrated, and ultimately doomed, McQueen.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7673-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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