A helpful starting place for women seeking positive advice on how to define their signature style.
This slim, to-the-point style manual helps readers become their own best image consultants.
Many style guides are prescriptive, insisting, for example, that every woman have a crisp white shirt and a tailored suit in her closet. But what if a woman doesn’t look good in white or a busy stay-at-home mom has no use for a suit? Rather than telling readers how they’re supposed to look, Beatty’s debut (written with White) takes a more individualized approach to developing personal style. “The depth of our beauty lies in our diversity,” she says. However, she doesn’t dismiss the importance of clothes: “Style is all about communicating who you are through the language of clothing.” Beatty focuses on helping readers express who they are through a signature style; in the process, they’ll improve their sense of confidence and self-empowerment. The book is aimed primarily at middle-aged women—the chapter on skin care focuses on the aging face, for instance—yet younger women just starting to discover their unique style can also benefit from Beatty’s clear, informative advice. The slim book can be read in one sitting, so readers can get to work putting the advice into practice right away. Simple work sheets, guidelines, and rules show readers how to craft a personal style statement, build a wardrobe, and become savvier shoppers, while inspirational quotes and anecdotes maintain reader interest. The helpful skin care chart guides readers through the dizzying array of available beauty products and helps them save money in the process. Yet some sections, such as the skimpy chapter on color, could use more explanation, and the body shapes chapter veers into the technical, requiring readers to take a lot of measurements to put the advice to work. Positivity dominates this style guide, urging women to enjoy dressing the body they have now rather than comparing themselves with celebrities or models.
A helpful starting place for women seeking positive advice on how to define their signature style.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1627871297
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Wheatmark
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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