A memoir from the famed fashion designer.
Born in Elmira, New York, in 1951, Hilfiger had eight siblings and came of age during the 1960s, when bell-bottoms, fringed leather vests, sandals, and long hair on men were all the rage. Dyslexia, an abusive father, and a full household turned him into a dreamer from an early age, and his five sisters made him aware of the current fashions. While still in high school, Hilfiger and two of his friends opened a clothing shop in an unused basement and found success. After attending a boutique show in New York City, Hilfiger had an epiphany. "I had never given real thought to designing,” he writes, “but at that moment it came to me: ‘This is what I want to do in life. I want to create a line of clothes. I want to be the one who picks the colors, the fabrics, who designs the pockets.’ "Of course, he went on to design far more than just one line of clothing, creating a global fashion empire in the process. Hilfiger's autobiography is typically full of family stories and candid assessments of his personal successes and failures. While chronicling the rises and falls of his various clothing endeavors, he openly discusses his early drug use and partying, his love of music, his father's abusive nature, his siblings, his marriage and subsequent children, his divorce, and his second marriage. His commentary provides a unique look into the fashion world and helps explain how clothing can make a statement based simply on a particular style of stitching or pocket design. The Tommy Hilfiger brand is known for its "preppy, all-American classics," and Hilfiger fits the bill for an American dreamer who succeeded in grabbing the American dream.
An honest, straightforward, mostly entertaining autobiography of the man who created a classic yet hip line of clothing.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-88621-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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