All the minutiae can’t hide the fact that since Wintour herself declined to participate, her interior life remains unknown....
Gleefully vicious biography of a New York fashion icon.
She edits the fashion world’s bible but couldn’t stay faithful to her husband. That’s Oppenheimer’s take on Wintour’s life: five decades of ruthlessness leading inexorably to huge professional success and crashing personal failures. Oppenheimer (The Other Mrs. Kennedy, 1994, etc.) starts with Wintour’s family, Wintour’s adolescent rebellion, her parents’ divorce, her many boyfriends, and her failure ever to graduate from college. At early jobs, she was miles ahead of the other girls in terms of ambition and style, as well as of cruelty (she was dubbed “bacon slicer” for her sharp tongue); more than one coworker also recalls that she couldn’t write copy for her fashion spreads, a handicap she apparently never overcame. Oppenheimer gives equal time to her jobs and her men, here chronicling affairs and there pointing out, delightedly, that Anna spent two years at Bob Guccione’s Viva magazine in the ’70s. The story winds up in the present, presenting Anna at American Vogue (she’d been at British Vogue earlier), twisting S.I. Newhouse around her little finger. Her innovative styling is well documented, as is her slash-and-burn technique of assimilating magazine staff (her once-trusted, recently sabotaged personal assistant was happy to discuss specifics with the author). In fact, the number of sources willing to be interviewed and quoted by name is the best indication of Wintour’s ability to command loyalty. There are details and revelations galore; unfortunately, the author’s completist tendencies—recounting the number of buttons on Anna’s high-school gym uniform, for example—bloat what could be a much more streamlined hatchet job.
All the minutiae can’t hide the fact that since Wintour herself declined to participate, her interior life remains unknown. Those looking for fashion-world dish won't quibble, since Oppenheimer otherwise offers such an in-depth look at Anna’s “bitch-eat-bitch world.”Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-32310-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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