Five stylish women in five vignettes-cum-case studies: how they lived, how they dressed, and how the closet reflects the soul. Canadian biographer Fowler, author of quartets and quintets of women's history (Below the Peacock Fan: First Ladies of the Raj, 1987, etc.) groups those old stylish chestnuts—Marlene Dietrich, the Duchess of Windsor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis—with a pair of lesser-known clothes horses,Empress Eugenie Bonaparte of France, wife of Louis Napoleon; and Belle Epoque writer and socialite Elinor Glyn. All five, Fowler states, ``wrote their life stories in fabric and feathers and furs.'' After a beginning academic essay defining style as ``a mode of expression which is laudable in its order, conspicuousness, consistency and cohesion of separate elements,'' she launches into five tales that utulize the rather less academic device of inhabiting the minds of the subjects: ``Now, she could feel his hot, heavy-lidded gaze on the black serge stretched taut across her breasts.'' Each heroine's wardrobe is described vis-Ö-vis her social, political, psychological, and sexual environment. Clothes are a metaphor: Jackie's pillbox hats were crowns for America's royalty; Eugenie's huge crinolines (ten feet of fabric at the hem) represented the ``sham'' that was the Second Empire in France—solid on the outside, but with no stability. If you can get past all the socially relevant chitchat, there's the good stuff: the clothes and jewels. These women had closets bigger than houses; they traveled with hundreds of trunks; they were never far away from servants with ironing boards. And best of all, they were self-invented and self-dramatizing. Elinor Glyn had five tiger skins, each one given to her by a different lover. Jackie wore evening gloves with 20 buttons. Dietrich had a swansdown coat with a four-foot train made out of 2,000 dead birds. Cruel and not environmentally correct, yes. But a nice dose of vicarious opulence for those of us who buy our duds at the Gap.
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14757-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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