Witty, tender and vividly nostalgic.
The spirited account of how an encounter with a memoir by couturier Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973) transformed a young girl’s view of what it meant to be a woman.
Novelist Volk (To My Dearest Friends, 2007, etc.) adored her movie-star gorgeous mother Audrey. However, even as a child, she could never quite countenance the “blind adherence to the mystifying virtue of ‘seemly’ [female] behavior” that Audrey demanded of her. She unexpectedly found another, more subversive model for feminine behavior in Schiaparelli, whose autobiography, Shocking Life (1954), Volk read at age 10. Like the author, “Schiap” was a much-loved child. But she was also one her parents “thought of as ‘difficult,’ ” who could never buy into the idea that there was “a right way and a wrong way” to do things. Schiap was no great beauty, something Volk also understood. Yet she still managed to create an enduring legacy as an avant-garde fashion designer with a genuinely artistic flair. Schiaparelli’s remarkable story provided Volk the “shock” she needed to grow away from Audrey’s certitudes—about everything from clothes to men to life itself—and into her own, unique sensibilities. If Schiap could be successful designing dresses that mimicked skeletal forms or hats that looked like shoes, then anything was possible for creative women who couldn’t fit the pre-existing gender mold that Audrey both touted and exemplified. Generously illustrated with images from the two worlds Volk depicts—that of her family and of Schiaparelli—the narrative that emerges from Volk’s deft interweaving of lives is as sharp-eyed as it is wickedly funny. Her attention to detail, especially in her evocations of 1950s New York, is nothing short of delicious.
Witty, tender and vividly nostalgic.Pub Date: April 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-96210-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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