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117 of 124 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Un Bijou for You, August 24, 2009
I read this book the way I read Ms. Karbo's book on Katharine Hepburn: greedily, with an eye to what was in it for me. I plundered every chapter heading: On Style, On Self-Invention, On Fearlessness... does this fit me? Could I/should I adopt this for my own? With some, like On Embracing the Moment, I thought, Oh sure, I've already got that; with others, like On Living Life on Your Own Terms, I was stopped short, and I thought Yeah! I've gotta cultivate that!
The other compelling thing about this book is that once you get past self-interest, you discover that Coco Chanel was an amazing woman. She invented modern fashion, and to do so had to rise above poverty and an actual orphanage. This was great material to draw on and reshape, which she did: Ms. Karbo says Chanel "lied about or embellished everything in her childhood...she had no respect for anything she didn't create, and that included her own history." Her trajectory included being a shopgirl, seamstress, cafe singer, and kept woman before she got to couturiere extraordinaire, and she owed nothing to anyone but herself. She was self-made and a revolutionary.
Karen Karbo tells Coco Chanel's story in a lively way and mines it for usable wisdom. I recommend this book for any fashionista, for sure, and for any francophile, and for any woman who loves the struggle. I especially like it for women who make things or strive to make things, like books or sculpture or businesses or anything else. The Gospel According to Coco Chanel is heartening and a lot of fun.
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104 of 116 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Who cares about Karen Karbo?, July 30, 2010
While this book does have a interesting tidbits on Coco Chanel, it was so annoying to read mostly about Karen Karbo (the author) and her personal struggles with whether she could afford to buy second-hand Chanel clothes on ebay (she assumes that readers can't afford Chanel either), what she (the author) studied in college, the status of her IRA (not good), and how she feels about the expensive things she can't afford (SHE feels qualified to call Warren Buffet a jelly-bean-eating fool?).
I struggled through the section, purportedly related to Chanel's "courage." According to Karbo, "In 1914, she was thirty-one, a few years past the age when women who were were neither married nor mothers were written off as 'redundant.' In this way things haven't changed much... To be thirty-one and unmarried is the same tragedy now as it was a hundred years ago."
Really?? not in New York... (what year was this book written??)
And I finally had enough when I read Karbo's description of the fact that Chanel never married: "While MANAGING TO MARRY is no guarantee that you know a single thing about the intracacies of loving and being loved, failing to make that final commitment suggests that somehow you never made it to the big leagues. If you're a woman, it suggests that something was deeply wrong with you, or, paradoxically, right with you; being too successful, too gorgeous, too smart and too sexy have also been known to send prospective suitors scampering down the mountainside..." (emphasis added)
First of all, this chapter teaches NOTHING about the Gospel According to Coco Chanel (the title of the book). Second, the author apparently sees marriage as something that women must "manage" to do--like "managing" to take a first prize in a contest? Third, remarkably the only acceptable excuse for Chanel not "managing to marry" is that because the woman is SOOOO great, men run away?? I don't know much about Chanel, but I believe it's possible that she may have CHOSEN not to marry--that Chanel "scampered away" from prospective suitors, and not the other way around.
In the absence of any evidence either way, why would the author just assume that no man wanted to marry Ms. Chanel?
According to the author, Chanel once said, "One marries for security and prestige. I'm not interested in all that."
Well, then, why write about her as if any potential suitors ran away??
If you want to know more about Karen Karbo and her financial struggles and opinions about modern marriage, perhaps you can read the rest of the book. If you're looking for a story about Coco Chanel, keep looking...
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43 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mais oui..., September 3, 2009
I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed this book... I loved Ms. Karbo's previous book about Katherine Hepburn, but as a longtime -- and unabashed -- fan of Chanel, I was really looking forward to this book when I read about it a few months ago in Bazaar.
Like Chanel herself, Ms. Karbo does not disappoint. Her writing style is tremendous -- witty and fun, moving and historically insightful, she is like a terrific dinner party guest you want to stay for the weekend (and tell nonstop Coco Chanel stories, of course).
I picked this book up as an impulse on one of the front tables of B+N, and read it over the course of two days.
As a modern woman who loves Chanel, I am suggesting it to all my stylish girlfriends, it would make a perfect hostess gift.
And by the way, I HOPE that Karbo gets that real Chanel jacket she is dreaming of.
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