The Vanity Fair Diaries
1983--1992
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- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
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نقد و بررسی
November 20, 2017
The pathbreaking editor records her greatest success and the effervescent media-biz surrounding it in this scintillating memoir. Brown (The Diana Chronicles) collects diary from her editorship at Vanity Fair, which she made into a must-read trendsetter with a mix of glamorous photo spreads (a picture of a nude and heavily pregnant Demi Moore became an icon), high-toned tabloid sagas of celebrities-in-distress like Claus von Bulow and Princess Di, and probing feature articles like William Styron's depression confessional "Darkness Visible." It's a frenzied story of last-minute photo dramas ("There was a problem getting the horse into the elevator"), editing tussles, pilgrimages to beg ads from fashion designers, and wary sparring with the magazine's shy but ruthless owner Si Newhouse. Swirling around the VF narrative is Brown's reportage on countless power lunches and cocktail parties, full of hilariously acid portraits of movie stars, socialites, literary lions and plutocrats, from Wallace Shawn ("a small, anxious hippo" with "a creaky voice and twinkly, creased-up eyes") to Donald Trump (a "sneaky, petulant infant" with a "pouty Elvis face" who poured a drink down a VF staffer's back after she wrote something unflattering about him). The result is a witty, exuberant portrait of print journalism's last golden age. Photos.
Originally from Great Britain, Tina Brown, former editor of THE NEW YORKER and VANITY FAIR, offers a rather offhand, sluggish narration of these self-aggrandizing diary entries. The name-dropping diaries were kept within the span of her years at VANITY FAIR. Here, in all their glory, are the excessive and extravagant go-go 1980s, but this chronicling of expensive and expansive entertainments and meals out is more likely to be of interest to those who were in her orbit at that time; otherwise, the work is absent any spark to ignite others' interest. This lack of context for the average listener creates a repetitive series of tales of big egos and even bigger sums of cash to be expensed to the Cond� Nast Corporation. Skillful power-brokering is also discussed, but that doesn't save the overall lack of appeal of the listening experience. W.A.G. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
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