An honest, straightforward, mostly entertaining autobiography of the man who created a classic yet hip line of clothing.
A memoir from the famed fashion designer.
Born in Elmira, New York, in 1951, Hilfiger had eight siblings and came of age during the 1960s, when bell-bottoms, fringed leather vests, sandals, and long hair on men were all the rage. Dyslexia, an abusive father, and a full household turned him into a dreamer from an early age, and his five sisters made him aware of the current fashions. While still in high school, Hilfiger and two of his friends opened a clothing shop in an unused basement and found success. After attending a boutique show in New York City, Hilfiger had an epiphany. "I had never given real thought to designing,” he writes, “but at that moment it came to me: ‘This is what I want to do in life. I want to create a line of clothes. I want to be the one who picks the colors, the fabrics, who designs the pockets.’ "Of course, he went on to design far more than just one line of clothing, creating a global fashion empire in the process. Hilfiger's autobiography is typically full of family stories and candid assessments of his personal successes and failures. While chronicling the rises and falls of his various clothing endeavors, he openly discusses his early drug use and partying, his love of music, his father's abusive nature, his siblings, his marriage and subsequent children, his divorce, and his second marriage. His commentary provides a unique look into the fashion world and helps explain how clothing can make a statement based simply on a particular style of stitching or pocket design. The Tommy Hilfiger brand is known for its "preppy, all-American classics," and Hilfiger fits the bill for an American dreamer who succeeded in grabbing the American dream.
An honest, straightforward, mostly entertaining autobiography of the man who created a classic yet hip line of clothing.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-88621-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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
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
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