Patricia Volk's new book, "Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli and Me" (Alfred A. Knopf), is a memoir about what she considers two of her biggest influences, her mother, Audrey Morgen Volk, and designer Elsa Schiaparelli, whose fragrance, Shocking de Schiaparelli, her mother wore.
the Insiders
Showing posts by Lorna Koski
March 19, 2013 3:28 PM
Eye
The Passionate Reader: March 19, 2013
November 9, 2012 1:13 PM
Eye
The Passionate Reader: November 9, 2012
In "My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by Charles Rowan Beye, a retired classicist whose 50-year career included professorships at Boston University and New York University, tells the story of his life as a lover of men who chose to marry two women.
August 30, 2012 1:26 PM
Eye
The Passionate Reader: August 30, 2012
Where did the Revolutionary War take place, and what traces of it still remain in those spots? That's a question Robert Sullivan elected to answer in "My American Revolution: Crossing the Delaware and I-78" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
June 26, 2012 5:25 PM
Eye
The Passionate Reader: June 26, 2012
Everyone has seen Man Ray's iconic photograph, "Le Violon d'Ingres," which shows a nude woman photographed from the back and ornamented at the waist with F-holes like those of a violin. But few know much about the woman in the picture.
May 8, 2012 2:20 PM
Eye
The Passionate Reader: May 8, 2012
Nell Freudenberger's "The Newlyweds" (Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf) manages to do the opposite of what many chick-lit books do. Rather than make extraordinary lives seem dull, it makes ordinary ones seem fascinating. It's the story of Amina Azid, who leaves Bangladesh for Rochester to marry George Stillman.
March 15, 2012 5:26 PM
Eye
The Passionate Reader: March 15, 2012
Everybody's heard of Henry VIII, but what of his father, Henry VII? The founder of the Tudor dynasty was a usurper who had little claim to the English throne, but proved to be an extremely modern monarch, who found that he could control his people by surveillance and by manipulating markets rather than simply by waging war.
February 3, 2012 1:43 PM
Eye, Media
The Passionate Reader: February 3, 2012
Fans of PBS' much-talked-about series "Downton Abbey" on "Masterpiece" often want to read more about the Edwardian era and World War I.
January 12, 2012 4:50 PM
Eye
The Passionate Reader: January 12, 2012
Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said, "Everyone has three lives, a public life, a private life and a secret life." That may be true, but these days, there seems to be a shortage of public intellectuals.
December 4, 2011 9:27 PM
Eye
The Passionate Reader: December 4, 2011
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow opined in "A Psalm of Life" in 1838
that "Lives of great men all remind us/We can make our lives
sublime/And,
departing, leave behind us/Footprints on the sands of time." While both
writers
and readers today take a much more skeptical, critical approach to the
lives of
the great than they did 173 years ago, biographies -- the more
unvarnished the
better -- have, if anything, an even stronger appeal. And this is a
particularly
good moment for books about important figures in the arts, among them
Vincent
Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway and Spencer Tracy.
October 20, 2011 1:31 PM
The Passionate Reader: October 20, 2011
As Charles Baudelaire put it, "A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors." And some of them also contain cautionary tales.
