An absorbing, bittersweet tribute.
The heiress to the Italian fashion house unfurls her combustible family history.
“A reserved child who’d had to grow up fast,” Gucci was born into an elite, high-profile familial legacy. As her candid memoir details, her father Aldo’s relationship with her mother, Bruna, was shrouded in secrecy and controversy. The author describes the company’s ascent to greatness by way of her grandfather, founder Guccio, and her father, who “transformed his father’s small Florentine luggage company into a global phenomenon that came to epitomize Italian chic.” Aldo’s death in 1990 left Bruna mired in grief, and her relationship with Patricia slipped deeper into estrangement. Yet two decades later, saddled with two failed marriages, the author began writing as a cathartic attempt to both connect the missing pieces of her parents’ complex romance and to afford Aldo his “rightful place in history.” Referencing a cache of her father’s love letters to her mother, the author explores the precarious evolution of their illicit courtship, from their budding attraction when Bruna was a teenage Gucci salesgirl in Rome to the author’s hushed birth (Aldo was already married with children, and Italian law forbade adultery). Treating Bruna as his common-law wife, Aldo raised his daughter lovingly if sporadically, shuffling her between England and Italy. Gucci describes him differently at alternating points throughout the memoir. As a fashion figurehead, he was a “trailblazing businessman of extraordinary dynamism,” yet as a father, he was the infrequently present “handsome daddy with the ready smile and distinctive cologne who flew in and out of our lives with a blast of movement and noise.” As solemn as many of her memories are, Gucci imparts these emotions with impassioned, poetic prose that buffers much of the hollowness of her restless childhood. Once jailed for tax evasion, Aldo watched the business suffer through tragedy and further familial betrayal as his daughter struggled to emerge from a cloistered life in the shadows of a fashion empire.
An absorbing, bittersweet tribute.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3893-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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
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
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