A lavish, capably rendered family biography that will speak to anyone who appreciates passionate artists and dealmakers.
A scion of the Cartier family delivers a rich history of their jewelry dynasty.
World-renowned for its iconic gems and designs, which have included the Hope Diamond, the Tank watch, and the panther bracelet, the Cartier brand is synonymous with innovative taste. Brickell details the company's creation by Louis-François Cartier in Paris in 1847; its growth under his son, Alfred; its 20th-century expansion to London and New York under the helm of Alfred’s sons, Louis, Pierre, and Jacques, whose gifts vaulted the company into an establishment that royals and America’s nouveau riche titans appreciated; and the sale of each branch when the heirs parted ways in the 1960s and ’70s. The author’s elegant writing and a talent for braiding the main narrative with quotes from the brothers’ letters enliven a bygone period in which craftsmanship and exclusivity went hand in hand. Brickell covers strategic moves that reveal the family’s savvy and strings colorful anecdotes throughout the wider story of one of the French luxury industry's key players. Sections on Louis, whose aptitude for talent scouting and taste stood out, capture the excitement of designing influential collections. From heiresses and exiled Russian nobility to maharajas and Hollywood stars, each client was treated with discretion. The chapters set in the 1920s portray a memorable glamour, and comments from Brickell's grandfather add a warm immediacy. Jacques' excursions to India highlight his skill in cultivating connections as well as the advantages the family had in boasting three dedicated brothers who could be in different places at the same time while representing the brand. Furthermore, the resilience during the world wars shows the family’s love of their homeland. In later chapters, the author depicts the company's structural changes after the brothers' deaths with cleareyed compassion and without assigning blame. Despite occasional disagreements, Louis, Pierre, and Jacques cooperated to create a saga of remarkable faith in each other and their motto: "Never copy, only create."
A lavish, capably rendered family biography that will speak to anyone who appreciates passionate artists and dealmakers.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-62161-4
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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
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