A manual that’s as balanced as the lifestyle it proposes.
Phillips (Sustainable Luxe, 2013, etc.) offers a guide to France with heavy doses of history, fashion, food, and popular culture.
The author fell in love with France on her first trip to Nice as a young girl, finding it refreshing, sexy, and so very old compared with her native California. After many more visits and a brief residency, she still loves the country just as much, but with a more jaded attitude. Paris may not be for everyone, she says, and she lodges complaints about its gray weather, inefficiency, inherent pessimism and unfriendliness, and French women, who she says “can be total bitches.” But just as she notes what she sees as France’s flaws, she also lays out her opinions on the shortcomings of her native United States. She finally realized that one can incorporate the best of the Parisian lifestyle into one’s existence anywhere; a relocation or even a visit to Paris, she says, is completely optional. To that end, she created this guide with an aim toward helping readers enrich their lives with Parisian influences. Through 18 chapters, she highlights the very best of the City of Lights—including its food, wine, fashion, film, books, architecture, and furniture—while providing recipes, tutorials, summaries, and anecdotes. At the same time, she draws attention to aspects of the American lifestyle that strongly contrast with French ways—particularly its conspicuous consumerism and “more is more” attitude. Phillips’ breezy writing style is fun to read—amusing and sometimes slightly caustic—and her rapier wit creates frequent laugh-out-loud moments. Her extensive bibliography and appendices are testaments to her exhaustive research. The book also serves well as a reference work, with an index to facilitate finding topics of greatest interest. It shows that one can always have Paris—unless one chooses not to.
A manual that’s as balanced as the lifestyle it proposes.Pub Date: June 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-69929-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lure of Luxe
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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