Secrest ably chronicles Schiap’s career and social life, mining others’ memoirs and reflections to fashion a colorful...
The life of a flamboyant couturière.
Italian-born designer Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) was a fashion star in Paris from 1927 until she closed her atelier in 1954. Known for clothes with “a daredevil swagger,” she favored bold colors, thickly padded shoulders and surrealist motifs, many inspired by Salvador Dali: a hat shaped like a shoe; a diaphanous evening dress screen printed with a gigantic lobster; a jacket whose pockets featured glistening red lips. Her contributions to mainstream fashion included the jacket dress, the wrap dress and visible zippers. Schiap, as she was known, was an egocentric exhibitionist who became a dress designer “by accident; it seemed an easy way to earn money.” And earn money she did, with businesses in Paris, London and New York that included perfumes, jewelry, and extensive clothing and accessory manufacturers. According to her daughter, she was a “mad socializer. Mummy got dressed up every night for her umpteen dinner parties, leaving me with a nanny.” Schiap needed to be always on the move, to be seen at every party and theater opening and to travel extensively. Surrounded by the rich and famous, she seemed, nevertheless, to crave affection. A friend described her as “a bit of a bulldog, setting up barriers so one did not dare approach her.” Prolific biographer Secrest (Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject, 2007, etc.) faced the barrier of finding few primary sources: virtually no letters, no diary and a memoir written in the third person that Secrest calls “an example of an evasiveness that was almost automatic, pages of superfluous description of minor events and irrelevant anecdotes” in which Schiap made only “cryptic references” to her marriage and daughter. A granddaughter refused to cooperate with the author, as well, and her friends were dead.
Secrest ably chronicles Schiap’s career and social life, mining others’ memoirs and reflections to fashion a colorful portrait of her “famously difficult” subject—but Schiap keeps the secrets of her heart.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0307701596
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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