Certainly a definitive portrait, especially considering Garelick’s intriguing venture into modern “branding.”
An admiring but evenhanded portrait of Coco Chanel’s (1883-1971) life and loves.
Cultural biographer Garelick (Electric Salome: Loie Fuller's Performance of Modernism, 2007, etc.) fully acknowledges the spate of recent research into Chanel’s wartime collaboration with the Nazis from her Hotel Ritz perch in occupied Paris—e.g., Hal Vaughan’s hard-hitting Sleeping with the Enemy (2011). Though providing no new revelations, Garelick offers a fine psychological portrait of the poor orphaned girl who spent seven years in an abbey, where she learned to sew and feel safety within its reassuring order and cleanliness (traits with which she would later imbue her couture). From working as a seamstress with her aunt Adrienne, then trying her luck as a backing singer in cafes and “water girl” in the Vichy spas, she possessed charm rather than beauty and, more than anything, the drive to attain her freedom the only way she knew how: with lots of money. A companion to rich playboys, she found in Englishman Arthur Capel a like-minded feminist partner; he set her up making hats out of his Paris apartment, then among the fledgling clothing boutiques in Deauville and Biarritz. A natural saleswoman and commander of workers, she succeeded smashingly on her own terms, adopting mannish, comfortable clothing that freed the feminine form from corsets and bindings, elevating cheap jersey and faux pearls as elements of high style, and essentially remaking the female silhouette in her own image: boyish, slim-hipped, flat-chested and athletic. Garelick pursues the catalog of Chanel’s subsequent ill-fated lovers, her work with the Ballets Russes, her vast earnings from Chanel No. 5 and her fraught partnership with the Wertheimer brothers while frankly discussing her relentless, social-climbing attraction to right-wing, reactionary and racist elements.
Certainly a definitive portrait, especially considering Garelick’s intriguing venture into modern “branding.”Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6952-1
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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