Great Dames: What I Learned from Older Women

商家名称	信用等级	购买信息	订购本书
		Great Dames: What I Learned from Older Women
		Great Dames: What I Learned from Older Women

基本信息·出版社：Crown
·页码：256 页
·出版日期：2000年03月
·ISBN：0609606123
·International Standard Book Number：0609606123
·条形码：9780609606124
·EAN：9780609606124
·版本：illustrated edition
·装帧：精装
·正文语种：英语

内容简介 They are ten outstanding women of the twentieth century. Each had an aura. They were mighty warriors and social leaders, women of aspirations who persevered. They lived through the Great Depression and a world war. Circumstances did not defeat them. They played on Broadway and in Washington. They had glamour, style, and intelligence. They dressed up the world.

In Great Dames, Marie Benner introduces us to a pantheon of women whose lives are both gloriously individual and yet somehow universal. Her subjects range from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who found happiness in her last decade, to Constance Baker Motley, who argued Brown versus the Board of Education before the United States Supreme Court, to Luise Rainer, who won two Academy Awards by age thirty, then fled Hollywood for good. We meet Kitty Carlisle Hart, a professional charmer and tireless advocate of the arts, and Diana Trilling, the intellectual's intellectual, who published her final, splendid memoir at age ninety-one. There are even the Becky Sharps, who maneuvered powerful men to help them ascend: Marietta Tree, Pamela Harriman, and Clare Boothe Luce. And the wonderfully flamboyant Kay Thompson, whose pint-sized creation, Eloise, gave her a place in American cultural history. Finally, there is Thelma Brenner, who was the first great dame her daughter ever knew.

These are women who helped shape a century. They were grand and they were gallant. Marie Brenner's portraits are intimate, vivid, and true, and full of subtle but important lessons. The way the great dames lived their lives--their rules, their codes, their insistence on certain fundamentals--are models that today's women should consider as they ascend to positions of leadership in a new millennium.

They are ten outstanding women of the twentieth century. Each had an aura. They were mighty warriors and social leaders, women of aspirations who persevered. They lived through the Great Depression and a world war. Circumstances did not defeat them. They played on Broadway and in Washington. They had glamour, style, and intelligence. They dressed up the world.

In Great Dames, Marie Benner introduces us to a pantheon of women whose lives are both gloriously individual and yet somehow universal. Her subjects range from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who found happiness in her last decade, to Constance Baker Motley, who argued Brown versus the Board of Education before the United States Supreme Court, to Luise Rainer, who won two Academy Awards by age thirty, then fled Hollywood for good. We meet Kitty Carlisle Hart, a professional charmer and tireless advocate of the arts, and Diana Trilling, the intellectual's intellectual, who published her final, splendid memoir at age ninety-one. There are even the Becky Sharps, who maneuvered powerful men to help them ascend: Marietta Tree, Pamela Harriman, and Clare Boothe Luce. And the wonderfully flamboyant Kay Thompson, whose pint-sized creation, Eloise, gave her a place in American cultural history. Finally, there is Thelma Brenner, who was the first great dame her daughter ever knew.

These are women who helped shape a century. They were grand and they were gallant. Marie Brenner's portraits are intimate, vivid, and true, and full of subtle but important lessons. The way the great dames lived their lives--their rules, their codes, their insistence on certain fundamentals--are models that today's women should consider as they ascend to positions of leadership in a new millennium.
作者简介 Marie Brenner is the author of four books, including House of Dreams: The Bingham Family of Louisville. "The Man Who Knew Too Much," her investigation of the life of Big Tobacco whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, inspired the Michael Mann movie The Insider, starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe. Her numerous articles have been published in The New York Times, New York, and Vanity Fair, where she is writer-at-large.
媒体推荐 Marie Brenner's 10 portraits of women of a certain age provide fascinating, gossipy and even entertaining reading. -- The New York Times Book Review, Lynn Karpen
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly

An accomplished author (House of Dreams: The Bingham Family of Louisville) and a writer-at-large for Vanity Fair, Brenner gathers 10 skillfully drawn portraits of women "of a certain age," ranging from Jacqueline Onassis to her own mother, Thelma Brenner. Eight of the pieces were assigned by and originally ran in Vanity Fair or the New Yorker. Her subjects include Constance Baker Motley, the lawyer who argued Brown v. Board of Education; Luise Rainer, who won back-to-back Academy Awards for Best Actress in 1936 and 1937; Kay Thompson, creator of the Eloise books; Pamela Harriman, a U.S. ambassador to France and Democratic Party fund-raiser; Clare Boothe Luce, author and U.S. ambassador to Italy; intellectual and author Diana Trilling; Marietta Tree, a political hostess and society figure; and Kitty Carlisle Hart, actress and former head of the New York State Council on the Arts. Brenner lauds their courage in surviving such catastrophic events of the 20th century as the Great Depression and WWII, and admires their drive and ambition, which in that era meant marrying or having liaisons with men whose wealth or status could help them achieve their dreams. What these women have in common, Brenner argues, is an ability to maintain a public life, to guard the image they created no matter what suffering might have been borne in silence. They rose to fame in a gentler era than our own, Brenner believes; her tributes are invested with nostalgia for the gallantry her subjects displayed in what was essentially a man's world. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Brenner profiles 10 women of varying degrees of prominence and accomplishment who came of age in a time when the outlets for women's aspirations were limited. They were all sharp-edged women who "knew how to stay on the floor until the last dance." The subjects include Jacqueline Onassis, Pamela Harriman, Clare Boothe Luce, and Diana Trilling. Although from divergent backgrounds, they all had wit and resilience and were noted for their ability to smile and deny whatever background (Jewishness, for example) or current circumstance (divorce from a prominent husband) might be a social hindrance. Among them are women of serious accomplishment and serious social climbing. Constance Baker Motley, who argued Brown v. Board of Education, seems in odd company here. Brenner's aunt was Anita Brenner, a writer and intellectual of the 1930s. So Brenner has the background and writing style well matched to this inside look at these fascinating women and their relationships with other famous people. Eight of the profiles originally appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Vogue. Vanessa Bush
文摘 From Chapter One: Kitty Carlisle Hart

It has always been Kitty Carlisle Hart?s intention not to be defeated by circumstances. The day of our interview, when the weather forecast involves Homeric gales, she has called for her fellow board members at the New York State Council on the Arts to be outside her New York apartment at ?eight a.m. sharp.? She has been brisk with me on the telephone: ?You can?t ever let the weather slow you down. We have eight arts groups to visit in Brooklyn. We always leave on time.? As chairman of the Council -- a post she held for almost two decades -- Mrs. Hart often roams the state, checking on the Frederic Chopin Singing Society of Buffalo, the Iroquois Indian Museum in Schoharie County, the New York Latvian Concert Choir, Poughkeepsie?s Bardavon 1869 Opera House, the Billie Holiday Theatre in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Man Fa Center and the Cucaracha Theatre, among thirteen hundred other groups that receive money through the Council. However enervating her rounds might seem to many people, she revels in dank rehearsal halls, watching ?glorious? jazz groups that spring up in crack neighborhoods. ?I can?t bear to be left out of a thing,? she says.

When I arrive at her building, on the East Side, a few moments early for the arts trip, the doorman takes me upstairs to her apartment. The elevator opens directly onto her foyer, a small space with walls covered in red velvet flocked paper, Victorian in its formality. Her apartment is oddly silent; there is no early-morning bustle. Waiting for Mrs. Hart to appear, I look into her living room, an elegant jumble of books, curios, awards, and faded pastel brocade furniture in some need of repair. It is one of those rooms where time appears to have stopped. A celadon-green carpet covers the floor, a grand piano stands beside a far window, and in a bookcase are Meissen and silver pieces, CDs of many operettas she once recorded, and a youthful portrait of Mrs. Hart, her glistening dark ha
……