A confident, confessional modern account of breaking free from image obsession.
Debut essays from the director of fashion and culture at Refinery29.
Though Korn, the former editor-in-chief at Nylon Media, worked at women’s magazines throughout her 20s, their constant use of thin, cisgender cover models often collided with her ideals of diversity, inclusivity, and body positivity. Before the concept of being “woke” gathered steam, the author promoted change, penning viral columns on subjects like body hair. “As women’s media grapples with how to be more positive and inclusive while covering topics like fashion and beauty,” writes the author, “I frequently find myself caught between two worlds—the world of empowerment culture and the world of perfectionism.” In addition to chronicling her rapid rise to the top of Nylon Media, Korn offers intimate forays into her struggles with anorexia, coming out as a lesbian, and finding meaningful love. The narrative serves as a poignant insider’s look at women's digital media as well as a tender retrospective on growing into adulthood in the early 2000s. The author is honest about her enviable position as a tastemaker, though some readers may not muster sympathy for her depictions of salary negotiations or dressing for Fashion Week. In the breezy, clever “Low-Rise,” denim trends inspire reflection on the complexities of sexuality, body image, gender presentation, progressive politics, and social media. “I was coming of age in a time when everything was hypersexualized,” she writes, “but I didn’t understand the relationship between that and actual sex, a disconnect that’s one of the main reasons I didn’t realize I was gay until after high school: it was like being disembodied.” Particularly incisive is Korn’s essay on feminist language being co-opted for profit while one of the author’s themes—that feminism and aesthetics needn't be at odds but that the beauty and fashion industry still need to change—is keenly observed, if familiar. Korn also offers darker reflections about personal and wider pressures on women.
A confident, confessional modern account of breaking free from image obsession.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2776-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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