Review: Towering World of Tamara Mellon- J.C N'est Pas La

I love fashion.So you can imagine how happy I was when I was recently sent an Advanced Reading Copy for the book, The Towering World of Jimmy Choo: A Glamorous Story of Power, Profits, and the Pursuit of the Perfect Shoe.  I've always been a comfortable dresser, but not matter how unsophisticated MY look might be, I've been a Vogue/Elle/Cosmo reader for years. The Prêt-à-Porter and Unzipped movies, two years in a row in the mid-90s? How could you not be a fan? Unzipped made me fall in love with Isaac Mizrahi. I was glued to my set when the sporadically aired Signé Chanel  would make its way into my TiVo queue and I had the opportunity to see the creative process that went in that year's Chanel haute couture collection. (See the beginning of the first episode on YouTube here... it is great!) Now, I have to say that it wasn't only because of the GORGEOUS dresses that Madame Martine as the head seamstress worked on or the braid-maker/farmer Mme Pouzieux were working on for the Chanel collection, though they were truly amazing. It was the whole process of all the work and creativity that went into the shows. Likewise, Project Runway had me at the very start. I loved seeing the competent Kara Saun create her magic for the first season of Project Runway, just seeing Daniel, Uli, Christian... they all swayed me to the beauty and joy of the creative process. But, when they are creative and I like them and then I love the clothes too... that's when I can't get enough.

Back to THE BOOK. Lauren Goldstein Crowe and Sagra Maceira de Rosen show the progress of Jimmy Choo leaving his Penang, Malaysia roots where his father was a shoemaker to end up designing shoes from his own luxury collection. After attending Cordwainers, he sold shoes at a stall after making them from a Kingsland Road, Hackney, Metropolitan Hospital ("Metropolitan") space-where artisans and businesses found a cheap, though perhaps unsavory location to create their wares. The real focus of the story, however, is on the unflappable Tamara (nee Yeardye) Mellon who convinced both Jimmy Choo and her father and his friends to invest in a Jimmy Choo-branded luxury shoe line. 

Tamara had seen Jimmy's potential for earning with a line of shoes after his sucess selling one-off pairs both in her role as an assistant to London Vogue Fashion Director, Sarajane Hoare and through her socialite friends she was partying with in London at the time. Her father used his Vidal Sasson connections from his years past to help get Tamara, J.C and Co., set up around the world, but particularly in America. As told, the success of the "perfect shoe" company was built from a recipe of Tamara's contacts, determination, her father's tough-as-nails business sense-which he clearly taught to Tamara, along with the mix of some luck and name recognition with celebrity (not the least of which was Princess Diana early-on with Jimmy Choo and then much later thanks to Sex and the City!) 

Goldstein Crowe and Maceira de Rosen's book reads like a very long mix between a fashion and business magazine article to tell how Tamara (together with Choo's niece-Sandra Choi, Robert Bensoussan and others) helped to build the Jimmy Choo empire from the ground up. They extoll how Tamara triumphed through personal loss when she got divorced, through sale and resale of the company up until now. Today she serves in the company's current incantation as the company's President, shareholder and board member. 

Signe Chanel showed how the Chanel staff posted a sign that showed whenever Karl Lagerfeld was in the office... it would say K.L n'est pas la or would flip for K.L est la! I would say the most tragic thing about reading this book for me is that J.C n'est pas la. I read the book hoping to find out how a kid brought up the hard way ended up having this great shoe empire, with the help of some visionary businesspeople. However, what I ended up reading about is what appears to be a crush by the authors for Tamara Mellon. At the end of the day, for me, it was Jimmy Choo who was missing from this tale. According to the authors, though he returned to run his own couture shoe business...he was considering shutting down because he was having trouble purchasing the quality shoe-components he needed to stay open. 

L-O-S-T, Season 5, Episode 7 (The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham)

See Doc Jensen's Teaser and Totally Lost-Part 1 for this week.

First off, as always let's start with Doc Jensen's review.

_________________________________

NIEL started us off on the LOST discussion this week:

I think they may have given something away last night, when Widmore gives Locke the papers and John asked who Jeremy Bentham was, Widmore tells him he was a British Philospher, "your parents had a little fun when they named you, so I thought i would to"  Perhaps a little slip that he and Ben, Richard all think he is a dolt and is not special. 

BBC Poll Books

There is a FB thing going around with the below instructions saying that BBC says most people have only read six of these. I couldn't find that story and I admit some of these I should have read. Looks like I have a new project!) I highlighted the ones I need to read. But keep reading, the only 100-book list I could find reference to is below that and it is a different list, so I higlighted that too (looks like DIFFERENT project!)

FB Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Tally your total at the bottom.
3) Tag others and pass it on.

Here's the FB list (looks like I have 69 of them- not counting the COMPLETE works of Shakespeare or The Bible, some of them I have on my shelf waiting for me, some I started but never finished and some I'm embarrassed not to have read, but I only counted the ones I HAVE already read):

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling 
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 
6 The Bible Does reading parts of it in church count?
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott 
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare I guess, maybe?
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier  
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk  
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger  
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegge
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (Actually embarrased I haven't read this.)
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald  
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens 
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams  
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck  
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll  
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy  
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens  
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis  
34 Emma - Jane Austen 
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (yeah, yeah... on my shelf)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (X)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (X) 
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (X)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (YAY!)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood 
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding 
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan 
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (you mean the Bowie movie doesn't count?)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens 
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon 
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac 
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding 
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville 
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker 
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson 
75 Ulysses - James Joyce  
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath  
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray  
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker       
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert  
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White  
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom 
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad  
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery 
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks  
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams  
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole 
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas  
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare Wouldn't this be included in 14?
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl  
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo  

According to the April 2003 BBC poll, the list is a little bit different and I've read 63 of these:

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher

51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie 

Review: The Canim Meet Tavi

I've read the previous four books and now we come to The Princep's Fury, Book 5 in the Codex Alera by Jim Butcher (his site is www.jim-butcher.com). And this one, while it isn't my favorite of the five, certainly moves the story along. We get to see a little bit more about the Canim when Tavi heads there with his troops to their land to satisfy a promise he is honor-bound to uphold. Unfortunately, the dreaded Vord are there already and between the threat of the Canim and the Vord's destruction, he has to act decisively to save his new friends. Meanwhile, back in Alera, his family is having trouble helping King Gaius Sextus- Tavi's grandfather. 

As always, Tavi can't do it alone. He needs the help of his girlfriend, and some of his best friends and advisors to get the job done and save what remains of the Canim people.

These books are a great read, a good adventure and I love reading them. I'll have other books that I want to be reading but will always pick up one of this series before others just for the pure entertainment value and escapism of a fun epic fantasy. I suppose if this genre is not your thing then you won't care for it much. Otherwise, great read. Have fun with them. I don't read the Dresden books, though I will say that I was sad when the Television Series, The Dresden Files, was cancelled.

A Beautiful Snapshot

Talk Cinema presented us with Maria Larsson's Everlasting Memories and introduced us to Maria's life and family. Maria herself is played by the subtle and charming Maria Heiskanen. Then, there is her larger-than-life husband Sigfrid/Siggie played by the excellent Mikael Persbrandt. Finally, the story is told through the eyes of their daughter Maja who propels the movie with her views of the world, bounced off of her parents and their relationship. Maya is played by (I don't have umlaut's handy) Callin Ohrvall.

This is a beautiful movie.  Maria Larsson is a good, no-nonsense woman who sees the world a little bit differently, and even more so when she holds a camera in her hands. Her everlasting memories are captured both in our hearts and minds through her lens. I love the idea about a film being about the beauty of life as shown through film and the fulfillment that viewing the world in that way can be. Siggie may be a blustering hound, and Maria might be a little too uptight but it works for this movie and it works for them.

Like Revolutionary Road from earlier this year, I can enthusiatically recommend this one. 

You Speak Prada?

I saw another Rom Com-Confessions of a Shopaholic- with the queen of Rom Coms amongst my friends, Liz. But she was busy texting the whole time... I think she must have seen it before. Otherwise, she's always into this type of movie. 

There were parts of it that I loved including Isla Fisher and Gilmour Girls' Krysten Ritter. They were great and there were some good quotes. She has a Devil Wears Prada moment at the end, where everything snaps into focus for her about what matters (as hopefully does happen in a good story when a fashionista is dictating the moral center) and she makes things right.

Just a fun movie, fun chick flick.  I thought it was better than He's Just Not That Into You, if that is any indication? :-) 

Great Zus!

Based on a true story, yummy Daniel Craig stars in  Defiance. Though I will say that I like Liev Shreiber as the Zus of the movie just as much. The two Bielski brothers, along with Jamie Bell (of Billy Elliot and more recently, Jumper fame) live in the forest of Belaruswith a small townful of Jews, including scholars, working men, women and children who were escaping the Nazis. As one would expect, the Nazis are after the Jews, and enemy of my enemy is my friend? The Bielskis teamed up with the Russians who were there fighting the Nazis.

There are parts that are touching. I liked it. I just wasn't really ready to see this style of movie on the night that I saw it. I have no problem recommending it though.