An inimitable life captured with spirited, winning immediacy.
Legendary art lecturer and L’OEIL magazine founder Bernier (Matisse, Picasso, Miró—As I Knew Them, 1991) collates jam-packed brief sketches of her long, eventful life.
As a roving fashion editor for Vogue from 1945 onward, the author met all the modern artists of the time, in music, design, photography and painting. She was one of the few journalists invited into the studios of Picasso, Matisse and Louise Bourgeois, and she depicts these prickly personalities with a startlingly freshness and intimacy. Bernier’s fortuitous career path was due partly to her peripatetic upbringing and family ties. Born in 1916 to an English mother and American Jewish lawyer from Philadelphia who was steeped in music, Bernier attended English boarding school and Sarah Lawrence College. She befriended musicians like Aaron Copeland and his disciple Leonard Bernstein early on, while living in Mexico after college and during her first marriage. Bernier got offered three jobs at Vogue at once, mostly by accident and knowing the right people. She admitted to Edna Chase that she knew nothing about fashion, to which the redoubtable editor replied: “My child, I know a fashion editor when I see one.” Tracking stories in Paris meant helping Horst photograph Gertrude Stein and her poodle; getting fabulous discount clothes from Balenciaga’s tailors and others; and being asked to interview Coco Chanel when she staged her postwar comeback in 1954. Each vignette is riveting with particulars. Bernier’s later years were notable for her marriage to English art critic John Russell and successful career as a “professional talker,” roaming the world giving lessons in art history.
An inimitable life captured with spirited, winning immediacy.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-26661-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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