A deep dive into the provocative art of creation and the toll it exacts from those touched by its gifts.
A juxtaposition of the storied arcs of two of fashion’s most celebrated, and ultimately doomed, geniuses.
The lives of fashion designers Lee Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) and John Galliano (b. 1960) have certainly been explored before. However, by comparing the victories and defeats of the two and adding in her own contemporary remembrances of each, T: The New York Times Style Magazine contributing editor Thomas (Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, 2007) has crafted a compelling drama about the high-stakes world of couture culture. Strangely, both men came from virtually the same background. Galliano was the son of a plumber, and McQueen was from London’s rough-and-tumble East End; they both landed at Central Saint Martins, the much-lauded art school. Thomas tracks the arc as Galliano parlayed his bad-boy reputation into the leading role at Dior. His is a strange portrait; he is a self-styled romantic who has admitted he doesn’t like designing for women because their breasts “spoil the line.” And then there’s the force of nature that was McQueen, who was driven quite mad by the pressures of his role at Givenchy. “If Galliano was a romantic, McQueen was a pornographer,” writes the author. “The Larry Flynt of fashion. He didn’t believe in frontiers. He didn’t believe anything was off-limits. Nothing was taboo. He accepted the brutality of human nature, didn’t try to suppress it. He didn’t want to put women on a pedestal like untouchable, unreachable goddesses. He wanted to empower them. He wanted to help them use the force of their sexuality to its fullest.” Anyone who even skirts this strange atmosphere knows the story ends badly with McQueen’s suicide in 2010 and Galliano’s long banishment after a drunken, anti-Semitic rant in France. This is a dark story about excess, commerce, aristocracy and fashion as high theater that is as operatic as the dizzying shows it describes.
A deep dive into the provocative art of creation and the toll it exacts from those touched by its gifts.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59420-494-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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