Johnson remains a fashion pioneer, but her storytelling lacks the wit or polish necessary to make the book a success.
A memoir from the model whom fashion designer Halston once called "the new beauty ‘It Girl.’ ”
In August 1974, Johnson (True Beauty: Secrets of Radiant Beauty for Women of Every Age and Color, 1994) transformed the fashion industry as the first African-American to appear on the cover of American Vogue. That appearance, she writes, “left an enduring mark on the country, its view of beauty, and the meaning of beauty for decades to come.” However, as she notes, her life and career have been scarred by unwanted sexual advances that began at age 12 and that include a frightening 1986 incident with Bill Cosby (which the author has talked about publicly following other allegations against the comedian). Johnson’s observation that modeling was "an industry that I would find to be overflowing with a toxic mix of deceit, manipulation, abuse, and backstabbing" is echoed in the details of her unstable personal life, which has been marked by a string of codependent relationships with leeching, unfaithful, or drug-dealing men who robbed her of her livelihood and self-respect, jeopardized her health, and nearly ruined her professional reputation. When she finally recognized that her life had become a battle of "self-loathing and self-destruction,” she was able to start down the hard road toward redemption. Though she remains a sympathetic, candid narrator, Johnson recounts these doomed romances and other personal issues with repetitious lamentations, and she doesn’t seem to have gleaned much wisdom from the experiences. She also litters the book with clichés—on one page, she uses "bright and early," "best and brightest," "nearest and dearest," and "crystal clear.” These are not only distracting, but they hold readers at a distance and demonstrate the author’s lack of real insight.
Johnson remains a fashion pioneer, but her storytelling lacks the wit or polish necessary to make the book a success.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7441-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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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