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
BOOK REVIEW
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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