A rare book equally likely to appeal to fans of Project Runway and students of contemporary Middle Eastern cultural history.
Fashion designer Raassi looks back on her years growing up in Tehran and her attempts to grow a business in the United States.
In this unexpectedly wry and winning memoir, the author opens with a turning point in her life: in 1998, when she was 16, she attended a party at a private home where the girls all stripped off their hijabs and long coats to reveal miniskirts and high heels. This wasn’t the first party she’d attended where this was the practice, but it was the first one to be raided by an armed government group. Raassi ended up spending five days in jail and receiving 40 lashes as punishment for flouting dress laws. From that opening incident, she detours back into exploring the contradictions of growing up in a wealthy family in Iran in the 1980s and ’90s, playing with forbidden Barbies, cutting up her mother’s mink coat and her father’s leather chair to make clothes for them, being one of the “mean girls” in high school, and breaking as many rules as possible. Then the author leaps forward to her parents’ insistence that she move to the U.S. after high school. During this time, she went through a series of experiments in fashion and business that ultimately led to her setting up the Dar Be Dar swimwear line. The feisty Raassi is honest about the mistakes she made, the failures she went through, and the complications of making a life in fashion. Chapters about the rise and fall of her Georgetown boutique and her decidedly mixed experience sponsoring the 2010 Miss Universe pageant suggest “the unglamorous sides of the most glamorous industry in the world.”
A rare book equally likely to appeal to fans of Project Runway and students of contemporary Middle Eastern cultural history.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4926-3518-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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