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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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