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
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
