This broad compilation of evolving fashion trends makes for a valuable addition to any reference collection.
A guide to the evolution of fashion trends of the past two centuries, useful to costume designers as well as amateur and professional genealogists.
Drawing on her decades of experience as a Hollywood costume designer, as well as two years as a columnist for Ancestry Magazine, the author presents a broad overview of 19th- and 20th-century dress. Her book, which targets genealogists, would be especially helpful for nonexperts who may want to learn more about their historic family photographs. Descriptions of each era’s dominant silhouettes, hats, sleeves and fabric details are illustrated by the author’s line drawings, hundreds of which appear throughout the book. These sketches are essential to understanding the difference between a toque and a cloche or the posture produced by the evolving corset in the early 20th century. The author’s deep knowledge of fashion, the book’s greatest strength, is evident in her cataloging of a broad range of men’s, women’s and children’s styles. Tidbits from the history of fashion, such as a re-evaluation of corset measurements that unzips the idea of the 16-inch waist, will also provide the amateur genealogist or costume designer with a window into the past. The book’s forays into social history and analysis, however, are less compelling. Zoot suits are dismissed as a mere outlying trend, and anti-fur activists are criticized for embarrassing fur-wearing women with their attacks. Queen Victoria gets a bit too much credit for changing courtship practices—“Since, as Queen, she had proposed to him, from that time on women in civilized societies decided to choose their own husbands”—and the oft-repeated myth of a “closet tax” driving people to store their clothes in cabinets gets a mention. There’s also, at times, a note of disdain for women who don’t conform to the author’s sense of taste, including derision for sausage curls on older women and frequent references to “fashion die-hards” who embrace trends beyond their prescribed end dates. The descriptions of historic styles and their accompanying illustrations, however, constitute a useful resource that outweighs the book’s shortcomings.
This broad compilation of evolving fashion trends makes for a valuable addition to any reference collection.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0983576167
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Flashback Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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