An intimate sojourn through the dressing rooms of one of America’s most luxurious department stores.
For 40 years, Halbreich (Secrets of a Fashion Therapist: What You Can Learn Behind the Dressing Room Door, 1997) has created fashion magic as a personal shopper with Bergdorf Goodman. Her revealing memoir chronicles her career and personal life.
The author, 86, details her privileged upbringing in an affluent Chicago suburb during the 1930s. “From childhood to child bride to a childish mother, I had always been taken care of,” she writes. An early marriage transplanted Halbreich to the more competitive East Coast, and New York, she writes, “was an introduction to an aggressive pursuit of fashion I had never before known.” When the author’s 20-year marriage crumbled, she spiraled into depression, ultimately requiring psychiatric hospitalization. However, she commenced a new life when a friend convinced her to seek employment at Bergdorf Goodman. The author’s sense of style trumped her lack of sales talent, and the novice sales clerk’s attire drew comment from fashion icon Carla Fendi. “I never had to look for work or even make a résumé for that matter,” writes Halbreich. “My appearance, the way I paired a print or tied a blouse, gave the illusion of confidence and mastery.” After more than a year without making a single sale, Halbreich suggested to management that she change her role to that of personal shopper. The author meticulously analyzes her role in her wealthy clients’ lives, a role that encompasses more than finding the perfect cashmere sweater. “I wanted to give my ladies fortitude in all things, and in that they felt better for just having asked,” she writes. “Like lighting a candle in a church, coming to see me was a ritual of comfort.” Halbreich describes her growing independence while an unlikely romance brought stability and happiness.
An intimate sojourn through the dressing rooms of one of America’s most luxurious department stores.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-570-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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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