A sharply amusing fashion memoir.
The editor of Cosmopolitan.com dishes on the world of haute couture and its “exclusivity, shameless self-promotion, and extreme ideals of what is and isn’t beautiful.”
In this collection of thoughts about her life as a fashion writer, Odell takes readers on a fun ride through an industry famous for its outlandishness. When she first began as a young fashion blogger for NYmag.com, the author quickly learned that she and her ilk were “like the global warming of the fashion industry—their impact only selectively acknowledged despite its undeniable existence.” As an unknown, she was relegated to the back row of fashion shows top-heavy with celebrities and egotism. She experimented with attention-getting—but sometimes frankly ridiculous—styles such as pink acid-wash shorts both on and off the job while learning about fashion forecasting from the likes of Li Edelkoort. Odell describes encounters with top designers like Rachel Zoe and Karl Lagerfeld that initially terrified her. Despite having to deal with ferociously protective assistants on the one hand and outrageous eccentricities on the other, her experiences with both left her feeling “delirious.” As Odell built her reputation, she caught the eye of Anna Wintour. The legendary Vogue editor interviewed her for a job that Odell characterizes as one for which she would have had to “[go] on valium every day just deciding what to wear every day.” Her rising status in the world of fashion blogging eventually led to a coveted invitation to the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. There, she met with the impossibly gorgeous women at the heart of the brand’s success only to learn that “they, too, are as self-conscious as the rest of us.” Odell’s insight into what fashion tells us about ourselves is ultimately what makes her book so refreshing. As she observes, “the fashion industry, in many ways, is a study in how deeply we long to stand out in order to fit in.”
A sharply amusing fashion memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4975-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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