A briskly written, unapologetically frank portrait of “the empress of American modeling—a mixture of Mary Tyler Moore and...
How Ford Models rose to power under the auspices of a no-nonsense doyenne.
British biographer Lacey (A Brief Life of the Queen, 2012, etc.) colorfully portrays the agency founded in 1947 by Eileen Ford (1922-2014) and her husband, Jerry, and the ensuing modeling empire that would become a pre-eminent force throughout the industry’s heyday. A third of this biography focuses on Ford’s pert Long Island youth as a voracious reader and Nancy Drew fan who found pleasure in high school “sorority socializing.” She changed her Jewish surname from Ottensoser to Otte in order to ensure her acceptance into an elite university (she graduated from Barnard College). An outspoken and bumptious young woman, Ford’s “on-the-fly” (and swiftly annulled) wedding to naval officer Charles Sheppard was followed by her nuptials with 20-year-old Jerry Ford in 1944. A department store advertising gig procuring models stoked her interest in fashion merchandising and the possibilities of combined talent management with her husband. Culled from countless hours of interviews with talent scouts, bookers, celebrities, and Ford herself, Lacey diligently maps the agency’s explosive success and skillfully intertwines the glitz and cutthroat melodrama of the modeling world with Ford’s shrewd, intimidating business strategies, uncanny vision, and ability to merge beauty with fame. The author clearly demonstrates that Ford was a multifaceted woman through both her chilly if well-respected industry reputation and her morality as a doting mother of four who forgave the infidelities of her husband. For as tyrannical as Ford’s legacy has painted her, Lacey concludes his biography with a heartfelt, bittersweet road trip in the summer of 2010 during which Ford, then 88, became a contemplative, almost melancholy tour guide along the streets of her Long Island childhood hometown.
A briskly written, unapologetically frank portrait of “the empress of American modeling—a mixture of Mary Tyler Moore and Barbara Walters, but tougher.”Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-210807-4
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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