An adoring homage.
An updated and translated biography of the famed designer.
Journalist and fashion writer Benaïm (René Lacoste, 2018, etc.) offers a meticulously detailed, overly worshipful biography of Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008), conveyed in prose as sumptuous as the designer’s acclaimed couture. Born in Oran in Algeria, where he was a shy, bullied child, Saint Laurent felt shame and fear about his sexuality. “Being gay in Oran was like being a murderer,” he told the author. Later, internationally famous, he saw “celebrity as a revenge on the petty humiliations of his childhood.” Recognition came early: In 1954, he became the youngest winner of a coveted international prize; the following year, Dior hired him as a design assistant; in 1957, when Dior died suddenly, the young Saint Laurent was named as his successor. Triumph followed as he mounted shows for Dior and, when he was 25, for his own company. Benaïm describes each collection in detail, including reviews—usually gushing, occasionally dismissive—and the roster of his wealthy, trendsetting clientele. “Yves Saint Laurent offered liberated women additional sophistication,” writes the author, “and he gave the others the certainty that they were modern.” He extolled svelte, androgynous models; while other couture models were slim, or even skinny, his, one commentator noted, “skirt the edge of death from malnutrition.” Besides documenting his fashion innovations, Benaïm attends to his expanding business, which came to include hundreds of shops; and his cosmetics, jewelry, and perfume enterprises, which gave the world the coveted Opium, a scent that brought in more than $3 million in its first four months. The author examines his relationship with his lover, the mercurial, stubborn, and powerful Pierre Bergé, who whipped the YSL brand into a hugely profitable empire. She also chronicles Saint Laurent’s physical and psychological descent compounded by alcohol and assorted drugs. A detailed timeline distills the events of his life, and the author even includes a playlist of music that accompanied his shows.
An adoring homage.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8478-6339-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Rizzoli Ex Libris
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
