A pop icon’s star-studded legacy decorated with red-carpet prestige.
The life and fame of “the American godfather of Pop art” as seen through the doting eyes of a former Factory staffer.
Fashion journalist and biographer Fraser-Cavassoni (Monsieur Dior: Once Upon a Time, 2014) was the last “English Muffin” to work for Warhol before he died in 1987. Her history prior to landing that coveted position and the ensuing years are lavishly detailed in a memoir exposing the true glamour of the Warhol-ian world. Her glitzy chronicle begins at her boss’s funeral, described as “the Big Apple’s equivalent of a royal event.” Yet it was also “strangely moving,” as the author became increasingly aware of Warhol’s notoriety not only as an idolized pop artist, but as a man with a uniquely self-effacing personality. Fraser-Cavassoni’s own history is also captivating. As the daughter of British writer Lady Antonia Fraser and the stepdaughter of playwright Harold Pinter, the author retraces her familiarity with Warhol from a “socially aware” youth courting extravagance and mischief to her first social encounters with the artist as someone “posh with cleavage.” The author then delves into juicier tidbits of her ill-fated dalliance with Mick Jagger, Warhol’s discovery and mentoring of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and her arrival in America rubbing elbows with celebrities and eventually landing a two-year tenure at Andy Warhol Enterprises. Once firmly ensconced in the business, the 1980s underground art scene swirled around her, and Fraser-Cavassoni unleashes an intriguing stockpile of anecdotes that will delight Warhol’s legion of admirers. Appearing in many of these escapades is Fred Hughes, Warhol’s business manager and confidant, a dedicated guide who steered Warhol’s artistic productions toward maximum profitability and notoriety. The author’s treatment of Hughes’ allegiance to the artist and painful physical decline following his death, along with the disposition of Warhol’s estate and diary publications, aptly tempers the high-fashion celebrity circus the author knows so well.
A pop icon’s star-studded legacy decorated with red-carpet prestige.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-18353-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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