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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
