MixedThe Wall Street JournalSympathetic ... Dutiful in giving Birkin credit as a serious actress and singer, but it never brings her fully to life. Birkin’s surviving daughters and friends, who might have offered a more intimate glimpse of her, did not cooperate with Ms. Meltzer. The result is a book assembled mostly from previously available material ... Nor does the book contain any photographs of Birkin, other than the image that appears on the cover—a particularly strange omission in a biography of a woman whose appeal was largely visual.
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalA picture emerges of Baker’s unfailing bravery in the face of extreme danger and her fierce loyalty to her adopted country.
Natalie Dykstra
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalSympathetic, impeccably researched ... Ms. Dykstra... compensates for the lack of material about Isabella’s inner life with insightful observations about her subject’s character.
Anne De Courcy
MixedThe Wall Street Journal... readable ... is less a study of Chanel than a snapshot history of the Riviera from 1930 to 1953, the years that the creator of the little black dress and Chanel No. 5 maintained her elegant, 10,000-square-foot home outside the town of Roquebrune. Chanel, in fact, disappears from the narrative for long stretches, as Ms. de Courcy fast-scrolls through the Côte d’Azur escapades of a rich cast of characters ... Ms. de Courcy missteps, however, in recounting a supposed episode in which Chanel was kidnapped from the Ritz...The author gives no source for this story, and it seems unlikely given its striking similarity to the well-documented arrest of Chanel toward the end of the war by two members of the French Forces of the Interior, the loose band of resistance fighters, soldiers and ordinary citizens who had taken up arms in a rampage of revenge against the occupiers.
