An overlong but relentlessly candid and often absorbing account of a complex life spent in and out of the fashion spotlight.
The essayist, critic, novelist, and former editor-in-chief of Paris Vogue reflects on the triumphs and excesses of her fashionable past.
As the only child of celebrated parents, Buck (Daughter of the Swan, 1987, etc.) enjoyed a privileged upbringing among many of the 20th century’s more notable celebrities. Her father, Jules Buck, was a Hollywood producer perhaps best known for helping to launch Peter O’Toole’s early film career. In sometimes-meandering detail, the author relives her restless years as she established an esteemed reputation as a writer and authority on fashion and culture. There’s some excessive name-dropping as Buck references numerous Hollywood and fashion elites in quick succession, yet rarely does she pause for many of these individuals—e.g., Donald Sutherland and Brian De Palma—to spring to life on these pages. Throughout the book, the author explores her complicated and evolving relationship with her parents. Her father, in particular, asserted a domineering influence even as his increasingly erratic behavior in later years weighed on her existence as a burden—but also a reliable touchstone. Buck’s narrative gathers focus and momentum when she lands the Vogue position in her late 40s. Within these chapters, she provides acute, illuminating observations on the challenges of running a fashion magazine and of the pretensions of the industry. Her description of Susan Train, Vogue’s Paris bureau chief, provides an uncompromising glimpse into this world: “She fielded the daily telexes from New York demanding a dress, a photographer, a model, a star, a location, a car, a different car, a different dress, a chateau instead of a house, not that chateau, the other chateau, visas for Yemen, customs declarations, tissue paper, dangerous wildlife, rare flowers, rarer flowers, bushes, buds, trees, photogenic children of impeccable pedigree. She flawlessly navigated the chasms of rage that roiled in the heart of every fashion player. Even the messengers were touchy.”
An overlong but relentlessly candid and often absorbing account of a complex life spent in and out of the fashion spotlight.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6294-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
