PositiveThe Wall Street JournalExhaustive ... Purnell keeps the momentum going throughout her tale, though she occasionally lapses into the purple prose...of a bodice-ripper.
Griffin Dunne
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalThough subtitled A Family Memoir, this book is really about Mr. Dunne and his father. Irish touchstones, such as wit, guilt and silence, are all here, spangled with late-20th-century Hollywood stardust ... While Griffin Dunne wrote this heartbreaking and wry memoir, it is unmistakably a Dominick Dunne production.
Jonathan Miles
MixedThe Wall Street JournalMiles has extracted the gems from ample research but offers scant original reporting. As he moves briskly through the decades, the anecdotes pile up like Legos, yielding a result that’s colorful but chaotic.
William Middleton
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalEven time-worn tales of merciless culls of friends and colleagues sound fresh in this recounting. Mr. Middleton lets Lagerfeld do the talking ... This feather-light succession of vignettes from “Lifestyles of the Rich and Peremptory” goes down as easily as Vanity Fairs at the salon. Alas, few Lagerfeld acolytes share his recall or waspish wit and gas on hazily, adding little.
A N Wilson
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Wilson makes up in wit what he lacks in celebrity antics ... He leaves no slight or sadness unexamined while traipsing through the decades, from his 19th-century forebears through his birth in 1950 in Staffordshire, England ... He mines these professional blind alleys, particularly the clerical one, for mirth ... The title’s Augustinian echo notwithstanding, there is little confessing here beyond Mr. Wilson’s self-recrimination over the occasional shabby treatment of his parents and first wife. As the subtitle signals, this is no bulletin of boozy exploits but rather a litany of shortfalls as son and husband, flickering betwixt the Catholic and Anglican churches and adhering to neither ... He livens things up with a parade of eccentrics ... Mr. Wilson embraces this old-fogy persona. He settles no scores here and keeps his criticism of writers to those safely departed ... reveals a dexterous storyteller who trundles out riskily meandering anecdotes—such as about J.R.R. Tolkien—yet chums them with details to keep his audience hooked ... Mr. Wilson examines the poignant human condition of being boring.
Amy Odell
MixedThe Wall Street JournalIn Ms. Odell’s workmanlike account, Ms. Wintour is a regimented contrast with her zany antecedents atop fashion magazines ... Ms. Odell’s book is a step toward decoding Anna Wintour, but it’s far from the final word.
