by Kate Betts ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2015
A colorfully descriptive memoir of life as a writer working the Paris fashion beat.
One woman’s passionate pursuit of fashion in the City of Light.
When Time contributing editor Betts (Everyday Icon: Michelle Obama and the Power of Style, 2011) went to Paris as a high school graduate in 1982, she dreamed of returning to the city to live. After graduating from Princeton four years later, she fulfilled her dream. She wanted to be a foreign correspondent, writing articles and news stories on the important events happening around her, but she quickly became immersed in Paris’ dynamic world of fashion. In this lighthearted, appealing memoir, Betts takes readers back in time to when she was a young woman, still searching for her identity, a tribe, or family of her own choosing, and a place to call home. She intermingles memories of life in her little flat in Paris, her French girlfriends, and long weekends with her lover with the rapid-paced world of writing about French haute couture. After landing a job at Fairchild Publications writing for Women’s Wear Daily and W magazines, Betts’ life escalated into the whirlwind that constitutes the fashion scene in one of the most fashion-conscious cities in the world. She learned to interview well-known designers and models and those whose work had yet to hit the big time, and she includes enjoyable anecdotes about many of these people. However, with impossibly long work hours and a highly demanding boss, the author’s world telescoped inward until every waking moment revolved around the gossip and anticipation of each new fashion season. Suddenly, she discovered she had lost her Paris dream. For those who are interested in the men and women involved in haute couture, Betts’ reminiscences will be a delight. For those who know nothing about fashion, the name-dropping may be tiresome, but the book is diverting nonetheless.
A colorfully descriptive memoir of life as a writer working the Paris fashion beat.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-679-64442-2
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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by Kate Betts
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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