A briskly written, unapologetically frank portrait of “the empress of American modeling—a mixture of Mary Tyler Moore and...
How Ford Models rose to power under the auspices of a no-nonsense doyenne.
British biographer Lacey (A Brief Life of the Queen, 2012, etc.) colorfully portrays the agency founded in 1947 by Eileen Ford (1922-2014) and her husband, Jerry, and the ensuing modeling empire that would become a pre-eminent force throughout the industry’s heyday. A third of this biography focuses on Ford’s pert Long Island youth as a voracious reader and Nancy Drew fan who found pleasure in high school “sorority socializing.” She changed her Jewish surname from Ottensoser to Otte in order to ensure her acceptance into an elite university (she graduated from Barnard College). An outspoken and bumptious young woman, Ford’s “on-the-fly” (and swiftly annulled) wedding to naval officer Charles Sheppard was followed by her nuptials with 20-year-old Jerry Ford in 1944. A department store advertising gig procuring models stoked her interest in fashion merchandising and the possibilities of combined talent management with her husband. Culled from countless hours of interviews with talent scouts, bookers, celebrities, and Ford herself, Lacey diligently maps the agency’s explosive success and skillfully intertwines the glitz and cutthroat melodrama of the modeling world with Ford’s shrewd, intimidating business strategies, uncanny vision, and ability to merge beauty with fame. The author clearly demonstrates that Ford was a multifaceted woman through both her chilly if well-respected industry reputation and her morality as a doting mother of four who forgave the infidelities of her husband. For as tyrannical as Ford’s legacy has painted her, Lacey concludes his biography with a heartfelt, bittersweet road trip in the summer of 2010 during which Ford, then 88, became a contemplative, almost melancholy tour guide along the streets of her Long Island childhood hometown.
A briskly written, unapologetically frank portrait of “the empress of American modeling—a mixture of Mary Tyler Moore and Barbara Walters, but tougher.”Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-210807-4
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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.
