A well-rounded, enterprising life’s journey, expressed with grace and humility.
A richly nuanced blend of memoir and personal opinion by a name synonymous with hairstyling.
Sassoon passionately recounts times of great joy and struggle throughout his life. He was raised in London in the 1930s by his beloved, headstrong mother Betty after his father abandoned the family, leaving them to exist in near-poverty. Placed in an orphanage for seven years, he emerged amid the turmoil of World War II and, acting on a “premonition,” Betty insisted he apprentice at the salon of well-respected London hairdresser Adolph Cohen. Though initially resistant, Sassoon acquiesced, writing that Cohen’s measured tutelage nurtured his budding haircutting ability and reshaped his personal appearance—with minimal fallout to clientele. During this time, Sassoon honed his talents with work in a succession of salons while remaining reverential to his mother’s Zionist beliefs. Respect for his heritage manifested in involvement with Jewish rights activism movements before he was drafted into the Royal Air Force at 18 and then traveled to Israel. The author writes of his eventual return to England as the driving force behind a thirst for beauty-industry wisdom and trade secrets from hairstyling luminaries. Former client Lila Burkeman co-financed his first independent salon in London, and, in the wake of two short-lived marriages, Sassoon ramped up his career, mingled with celebrities and designers at styling competitions and finally opened a newer salon that quickly caught the attention of the media. The advent of the author’s signature geometric cut (specifically on actress Nancy Kwan) and pixie style (Mia Farrow) became pivotal as business expansion to America boosted his exposure, making way for a distinctive line of hair-care products. Sassoon consistently demonstrates compassion and finesse when writing about the evolution of his family, friends, romance, humanitarian work and the charmed livelihood that made him a household name.
A well-rounded, enterprising life’s journey, expressed with grace and humility.Pub Date: April 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-230-74689-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Macmillan UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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