Funny and informative, with the kick of a dry martini.
Maas (Adventures of an Advertising Woman, 1987, etc.) looks back on her days as a pioneering female copywriter and ad executive in the heady ’60s and ’70s, dishing on the profligate behavior characteristic of the industry at that time as dramatized by the TV series Mad Men.
The author frequently references that show’s authenticity (and occasional infelicities) as she remembers the institutional sexism and hard-partying ethos of the ad business in those years, but her real brief is to reflect on the special challenges facing women whose professional success often came at the expense of feeling fulfilled as wives and mothers. Maas was a star at Ogilvy and Mather, rising from copywriter to creative director and ultimately establishing her own firm (she would oversee the iconic “I Love New York” campaign of the mid ’70s), but her success was tempered by guilt over neglecting her young daughters and fraught with what today could only be described as gross sexual harassment. The author writes without bitterness about these difficulties, managing to convey the fun and excitement of the era and cheekily recounting tales of wild affairs and stylish dissolution. She has interesting observations about the “creative revolution” that swept the industry during her heyday and provides juicy anecdotes about such figures as advertising legend David Ogilvy and hotel magnate Leona Helmsley (with whom she had a brief and disastrous professional entanglement). Maas’ memoir will likely not have the impact of her classic 1977 tome How to Advertise (co-written with Kenneth Roman), but this slight volume is a bracing and consistently engaging look at the realities behind the fetishized nostalgia of Mad Men.
Funny and informative, with the kick of a dry martini.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-64023-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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