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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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