European-celeb biographer Pochna writes a serviceable history of Christian Dior on the 50th anniversary of the ``New Look.'' In February 1947 Dior launched a postwar fashion revolution, dubbed the New Look by Harper's Bazaar. Dior, 42 when the first collection was shown, was a late bloomer. Not fashionable-looking at all, he was a chubby, bald man (he once escaped a Chicago train station filled with angry demonstrators awaiting his arrival because he didn't resemble anyone's idea of a fashion arbiter). He was born in Normandy to upper-middle-class parents who made their fortune manufacturing fertilizer. He disappointed his family by having no aptitude for their business, and sadly, they did not live to see him become the first couturier to make millions licensing his name. Dior spent an exhilarating youth mixing with the revolutionary artists of 1920s Paris. During the Depression, when his father lost his entire fortune, Christian began to work as a fashion illustrator and designer. After the war, he was bankrolled in his own house by the textiles billionaire Marcel Boussac. Dior envisioned ``a very small, very exclusive house . . . going back to the great traditions of luxury in French couture.'' He wanted to design for a few elegant, exquisite women, and after the deprivations of war, he wanted to make women beautiful again. Pochna uses the present-tense and lots of exclamation points to re-create the excitement of the debut showing, when the world first saw his tight bodices, wasp waists, and skirts made of 40 yards of material. The book is marred by repetitions and some contradictions (e learn three times, for example, that Dior's mother would have hated to see his name in front of a shop). Pochna exhibits a personal charm that must have helped win her some difficult interviews, but the bio often seems disjointed and unpolished. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55970-340-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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