Like the mini-skirt she is known for inventing, 40-year fashion veteran Tiel bares it all on sex, love and Elizabeth Taylor.
“Life itself is the party” in the author’s debut—and what a delicious romp it is. Her memoir reads like all of the juiciest bits of your favorite gossip magazine, pushing back the curtains of an over-the-top life among the who’s who of the ’60s-’80s, including the original Hollywood power couple, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Readers will frolic along with Tiel as a 17-year-old sassy Greenwich Village “it-girl” who called herself “Peaches LaTour.” Later, as a French couture designer, Tiel summoned the gall to tell legendary designer Coco Chanel with a smile, “I am you—when you were young.” Much like the red-leather catsuits and hot-pink caftans for which she is known, Tiel’s tour through the past is fun, flirty, flattering and, above all, revealing without being sleazy. She recalls, with great affection, Taylor and Burton’s “private, intense love and eternal interest in each other,” Miles Davis’ “preference for Jewish girls as lovers” and her father’s sage advice to never “marry for security,” and that “if you make your own money, you never have to eat shit from a man.” The author rounds it out with additional tidbits, such as Sophia Loren’s pasta recipe and Edith Head’s life lessons. An enjoyable confection.
Pub Date: May 29, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-65909-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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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 19, 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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