Entertaining reading for fashionistas and Johnson fans alike.
An iconic fashion designer tells the story of how she left behind a Rockwell-ian New England youth to become an eccentric fashion superstar.
Johnson grew up in a picture-perfect Connecticut family during the 1940s and ’50s. The second of three children, she learned early on to rely on her “bubbly, oddball personality to make my way in the world.” Her first dream was to become a dancer with the Rockettes in New York City, but by the time she was in college, she gravitated toward art. An admirer of Mademoiselle layouts, she entered the magazine’s fashion guest editing contest and won; a senior editor then hired her in the art department. To make ends meet, Johnson began making simple, striking clothes that quickly became popular among other women, including actress Kim Novak. She then began designing clothes full-time for Paraphernalia, a clothing boutique that became home to other 1960s avant-garde fashion designers such as Daniel Hechter and Paco Rabanne. Her unique creations caught the eyes of celebrities like Julie Christie and the Velvet Underground, a band for whom she became the chief clothing designer. After marrying and then divorcing guitarist John Cale, she opened a “designer collective” clothing store with Paraphernalia colleagues and also did freelance work, which eventually won her the Coty Fashion Critics’ Award in 1971. Not long afterward, she became a single mother and embraced an edgier aesthetic, which included clothing lines done in Lycra, a fabric then used only for athletic wear. By the 1980s, Johnson was the owner of a successful chain of stores, until her company was bought out by designer Steve Madden in 2010. This candid book by a pioneering female entrepreneur and American original, illustrated with photos and quirky doodles, also offers details about motherhood, marriages to drug addicts and control freaks, and the obstacles one faces when battling breast cancer.
Entertaining reading for fashionistas and Johnson fans alike.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-56141-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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