A confident, confessional modern account of breaking free from image obsession.
Debut essays from the director of fashion and culture at Refinery29.
Though Korn, the former editor-in-chief at Nylon Media, worked at women’s magazines throughout her 20s, their constant use of thin, cisgender cover models often collided with her ideals of diversity, inclusivity, and body positivity. Before the concept of being “woke” gathered steam, the author promoted change, penning viral columns on subjects like body hair. “As women’s media grapples with how to be more positive and inclusive while covering topics like fashion and beauty,” writes the author, “I frequently find myself caught between two worlds—the world of empowerment culture and the world of perfectionism.” In addition to chronicling her rapid rise to the top of Nylon Media, Korn offers intimate forays into her struggles with anorexia, coming out as a lesbian, and finding meaningful love. The narrative serves as a poignant insider’s look at women's digital media as well as a tender retrospective on growing into adulthood in the early 2000s. The author is honest about her enviable position as a tastemaker, though some readers may not muster sympathy for her depictions of salary negotiations or dressing for Fashion Week. In the breezy, clever “Low-Rise,” denim trends inspire reflection on the complexities of sexuality, body image, gender presentation, progressive politics, and social media. “I was coming of age in a time when everything was hypersexualized,” she writes, “but I didn’t understand the relationship between that and actual sex, a disconnect that’s one of the main reasons I didn’t realize I was gay until after high school: it was like being disembodied.” Particularly incisive is Korn’s essay on feminist language being co-opted for profit while one of the author’s themes—that feminism and aesthetics needn't be at odds but that the beauty and fashion industry still need to change—is keenly observed, if familiar. Korn also offers darker reflections about personal and wider pressures on women.
A confident, confessional modern account of breaking free from image obsession.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2776-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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