Great read for those interested in events in the fashion industry and the personalities who shape it.
A lively glimpse of the fashion industry and the characters behind it from American Vogue creative director Coddington.
The author begins with her childhood in Wales, but the memoir really comes to life when she describes her modeling days in London. Her big break came early, when a contest landed her in Vogue. Coddington expresses nostalgia for the carefree world of fashion in the 1960s, before the supermodels and celebrities arrived. During that time, there were no makeup artists, and models arrived with a suitcase of their own hair products and accessories. Coddington’s descriptions and illustrations bring that world to life. Even though her modeling career was interrupted with a disfiguring car accident, she dove back in once she healed. Her stylist career started with British Vogue, and she later moved to Calvin Klein in America and then to American Vogue when Anna Wintour became the editor-in-chief. The author provides intriguing portraits of Karl Lagerfeld and other big names, but she focuses mostly on Wintour’s public persona. Coddington’s personal life plays second fiddle to her role in the fashion industry. She mentions her boyfriends and her two husbands, but she glides through her relationships with them. Coddington’s tone is incredibly blunt. For example, she lets her envy of Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, another stylist at American Vogue who was also in favor with Wintour, seep through the narrative.
Great read for those interested in events in the fashion industry and the personalities who shape it.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9335-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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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