An engaging, if empty, showbiz memoir.
An advertising pioneer’s memoir of a successful career.
A “big” life is apparently one that results in power and money. If that is the case, then Lawrence has certainly led such a life. A small-town girl who aspired to become an actor, Lawrence instead found her calling in advertising. She quickly rose from department-store copywriter to advertising executive and opened her own advertising agency, Wells Rich Greene, in 1966. There, she was able to promote her view of advertising as the point of intersection between theater and business. Armed with consumer surveys and performance indicators, Lawrence used this data as a jumping-off point for commercials that were both attention-grabbing and personal. Among her successes were the campaign that gave Braniff Airways visibility by painting their planes vivid colors, the “plop, plop . . . fizz, fizz” Alka-Seltzer series, and the still-prominent “I Love New York” ads. As a result of their creative approach, Lawrence’s agency won a reputation for resuscitating lost brands and set industry records for growth. Lawrence’s narration makes it easy to see why her company had such success. There is a fast-talking, performative quality to the text that no doubt fueled brainstorming sessions and boardroom meetings as much as it does this narrative. Take, for example, Lawrence’s description of her reaction to the idea to paint Braniff’s airplanes: “Seven colors looked like a big idea and wow and friendly and it would be big news.” This effervescence pulls the reader through a story that reveals little. Even at the end, one has little sense of Lawrence as something other than a determined and charismatic executive. Her personal life, which includes two daughters, a divorce and remarriage, and a bout with cancer, is mostly ignored. Even the difficulties of being an early female CEO, though touched upon, are dealt with simply and without reflection. It’s ambition that’s big in these pages, not life.
An engaging, if empty, showbiz memoir.Pub Date: May 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40912-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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
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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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