by Dodie Kazanjian & Calvin Tomkins ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 4, 1993
Backstage view of the various lives of the legendary Liberman- -artist, photographer, and powerful editorial director of the CondÇ Nast magazines—by journalist Kazanjian and New Yorker staff writer Tomkins (Post-to-Neo, 1988, etc.). Liberman was born in 1912 in Russia to brilliant timber- industry analyst Semeon Liberman and Henriette Pascar, a domineering extrovert who directed a state-run children's theater before the family left the Soviet Union for good. Educated at English and French boarding schools, and pushed by Henriette to be a painter, Liberman in 1933 became assistant art director for the Paris weekly Vu. In 1941, he left Nazi-occupied France for N.Y.C., where Vu owner Lucien Vogel introduced him to publisher CondÇ Nast. Particularly interesting here are glimpses of the evolution and workings of CondÇ Nast publishing and Vogue as they passed through the hands of various editorial innovators (``difficult to control'' Diana Vreeland, Anna Wintour, etc.) while Liberman (art director of CondÇ Nast from 1941-62) hovered in the wings. The sharp-eyed authors are frank about Liberman's extravagant socializing, his creative insecurities, and his subservience to his demanding wife, Tatiana, a hat designer at Saks who died in 1991 after a Demerol- addicted old age. According to Tatiana's daughter, writer Francine du Plessix Gray, Liberman thrived on the ``thrill of...walking the tightrope of power and winning respect as a serious artist.'' The authors credit Liberman's long-term influence in magazines to his ``world class charm'' and ``protean and infinitely renewable'' style, and they quote one Vogue editor as saying that Liberman goes for ``the deepest humanity and the deepest meaning''—but also for the ``cheap thrill.'' Liberman's deeper loyalty, the authors contend, is to his painting and sculpture, excellently analyzed here in the context of the New York School. Intriguing, persuasive account of a mercurial personality and the American fashion journalism he helped shape. (One hundred b&w photographs promise, judging from the eight seen, to add both gloss and substance.)
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-394-57964-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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