Refreshingly, Stadiem mostly avoids making the narrative overly gossipy, and it’s good fun to see what devils some of our...
An eye-opening biography of “the elegant French Queen of Sex.”
As she reflected on her legendary career, Madame Claude (1923-2015) opened up to screenwriter and biographer Stadiem (Jet Set: The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years, 2014, etc.) about her life. The author opens with the tale of her arranging one of her “swans” to meet with President John F. Kennedy during his time in Paris. Beginning in 1957, Madame developed an entirely new outlook on the sex industry. Her requirements were simple and rigid: Her girls, never to be called prostitutes, had to be beautiful, tall, intelligent, and good in bed. They were the cover girls next door, mostly from the upper classes. Madame sent them for teeth straightening, plastic surgery, and lessons in diction, dance, music, and even skiing. When they were perfect, they would earn more than enough to repay Madame, or they would find a husband to pay off the sizable debt incurred. She knew enough to deal only with wealthy customers, and she charged accordingly, taking a 30 percent commission. She never had a problem recruiting swans; they came to her. Their motivation at first was cash-based. Eventually, as the author shows, she developed her brand, and girls flocked to her, submitting to her candid, sometimes-vicious appraisals. At the beginning of her career, two developments created her market: the telephone and the jet set crowd. The oil embargo of the 1970s brought oil-based wealth. Her contacts included sheiks, movie stars, nobility, and heads of state. Her business flourished tax free, but she was careful in her dealings. Charles de Gaulle’s government, as well as those that followed, artfully ignored her business, and she even met weekly with the police and shared intelligence. She never entertained, socialized, or allowed drugs; she just connected rich men with their fantasies.
Refreshingly, Stadiem mostly avoids making the narrative overly gossipy, and it’s good fun to see what devils some of our political and cultural heroes really were.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12238-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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