PositiveThe Spectator (UK)Braude tries hard to be even-handed, but Kiki is a far more engaging character than the difficult Man Ray, who begrudged her her celebrity.
Justine Picardie
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... painstaking archival research. Picardie has pieced the story together from others who were with Catherine Dior at the same time and who did leave records of what they had undergone: not for themselves, but for the dead fellow-prisoners they could never forget. Some of the most moving images in this richly illustrated book are the tiny drawings and gifts that the women made for each other in Ravensbrück, to keep themselves from despair and maintain their self-respect ... the juxtaposition of terrible shadows and dazzling light is one of the great strengths of this book ... She charts the development of the Christian Dior fashion house with gusto, conveying the excitement and wonder ... This is a very personal, very passionate book ... It is perhaps ungenerous to be impatient with her wistful musings at certain points in the narrative, because Picardie makes the reader realize just how much glancing away, how much silence and deliberate forgetting, it took to remake postwar France.
