A sorry story of war-time collaboration, exacerbated by the lack of reckoning during her lifetime.
Tenacious digging into secret wartime records reveals a worsening case for the legendary French designer.
That Chanel took a German officer as a lover during the French Occupation is not news—his status allowed her to keep her luxury apartments in the Ritz Hotel during the war and pass freely among restricted areas. Yet the extent of her collaboration has been vigorously denied for years. Questioned before a French tribunal right after the war, Chanel was swiftly released by the beneficent intervention of Winston Churchill, her old friend, and warned to get out of town. Relocated to Switzerland, she was soon joined by the very German lover in question: Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, an agent for the German military espionage service, who had been stationed in Paris since the mid-’30s to build a Nazi propaganda network in France. Roving journalist and diplomat Vaughan (FDR’s 12 Apostles: The Spies Who Paved the Way for the Invasion of North Africa, 2006, etc.) sifts through the shifting lives of Gabrielle Chanel, born in 1883 to a poor mother and itinerant father, and farmed off to a Catholic orphanage by age 12. She continually remade herself, from seamstress to café singer to mistress of rich, worldly men, who set her up in business. Her most influential paramour (for her postwar career) would prove to be the profligate Bendor, the Duke of Westminster, and Churchill’s good friend. Together, Bendor and Chanel could indulge their anti-Semitic, pro-German views. Cooperating with the Nazis helped free Chanel’s nephew from a German POW camp, while the newly instated Aryanizing of Jewish businesses promised the chance to wrest her lucrative perfume firm from the hands of the Wertheimer family, to whom she had sold it years before. Well rendered by Vaughan, the details grow continually more sordid, from Chanel and Dincklage’s trip to Madrid and Berlin to try to influence high-level British circles in 1943, to Chanel’s drug addiction.
A sorry story of war-time collaboration, exacerbated by the lack of reckoning during her lifetime.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59263-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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