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
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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