With humility and honesty, von Furstenberg’s reflections on a life lived in the grandiose couture spotlight will delight...
High-fashion doyenne von Furstenberg (Diane: A Signature Life, 1998) celebrates a wellspring of wisdom and design inspiration.
Addressing the core factors that made her who she is today, von Furstenberg, 67, shares how her familial roots, love life, celebrity and entrepreneurialism all played a part in molding her psyche. Greatly indebted to and influenced by her mother, a Nazi concentration camp survivor, the Belgium-born designer fondly describes her solitary childhood roots growing up in Brussels instilled with the initiative to explore, be free and exercise self-reliance. Her thoughts on love and those who influenced her middle years (especially marriages to Prince Eduard Egon and Barry Diller) reads like a sweeping romance novel, thanks in part to the men themselves but more due to von Furstenberg’s penchant for dramatic, lavishly embellished prose. A bout with cancer in the mid-1990s perhaps enhanced her appreciation for a homeopathic lifestyle and a passion for nature, rearing her children and the experience of grandparenting. She also shares thoughts on youth, beauty, aging and the many rewarding moments throughout her decades in fashion merchandising. Von Furstenberg’s global luxury-lifestyle empire’s multitiered ascent, borne from the design of the iconic and timeless wrap dress, has crested somewhat, requiring a more recent rebranding and reidentification. In the final section, she braces herself for the compounded challenge of restoring her brand’s luster and reigniting interest in DVF, including a comeback runway show featuring Google Glass. Though much of her autobiographical material can be found in her debut memoir, the fashionista digs deeper this time, swapping pages of name-dropping for introspective insights and sage advice, all while keeping her saga compelling and spicy.
With humility and honesty, von Furstenberg’s reflections on a life lived in the grandiose couture spotlight will delight both trendy, fashion-forward readers and budding designers eager to follow in her footsteps.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1451651546
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
