Inspiring reading for the style-inclined.
A memoir from the first Black editor-in-chief of British Vogue.
The son of a Ghanaian military officer and his gifted dressmaker wife, Enninful (b. 1972) discovered his love of fashion early in life. He spent his boyhood in his mother’s workshop, “transported by the whole experience…the colours, the fabrics, the loving attention of my mother and her staff.” Hiding his love of fashion and glamour from his disapproving father (“The Enninful boys would be doctors and lawyers: respectable, distinguished, cerebral, credentialed, dull”), he began exploring what would later become a career as a fashion stylist. In 1981, after a political coup in Ghana, the family moved to London, where the author suddenly came face to face with racial prejudices he had not experienced in his birth country. At the same time, the ethnically diverse working-class neighborhood where he spent most of a closeted gay adolescence helped Enninful establish the beginnings of an identity based in the vibrancy of street culture. His entree into the world of fashion came when he accepted a modeling job for the independent London fashion magazine i-D, “the closest you could come then to a pure documentary of British youth and their culture tribes.” Enninful soon stepped behind the camera to work as a photographer’s assistant, a fashion commentator, and, finally, a stylist. His professional successes eventually gave him the courage to come out as a gay man and endure the wrath of a father who threw him out of the family home. His forced independence became the catalyst that propelled Enninful to increasing levels of success at i-D, Vogue Italia, and Vogue in the U.S., where he worked with the legendary Anna Wintour and pushed for greater diversity among the magazine’s models. That experience led Enniful to British Vogue, where, as editor-in-chief, he transformed staid layouts into groundbreaking statements about fashion, culture, and race—all of which he captures in this vibrant memoir.
Inspiring reading for the style-inclined.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-29948-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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