Thanks to a combination of business savvy, breathtaking chutzpah, and lucky timing, Helena Rubinstein managed to transform herself from a poor Polish emigrant to the world's first self-made female tycoon. She went from selling homemade "Crème Valaze" out of her house in Australia to becoming an international cosmetics magnate. Tiny and plump, wearing extravagant jewels and spiked heels, she was a fixture of upper-crust New York for many years. She was larger than life, and never took no for an answer: when she was refused from a New York City apartment on the grounds that she was Jewish, she went ahead and bought the whole building and promptly moved in. The story of Eugène Schueller and L'Oréal begins in 1907, in a dingy working-class part of Paris, where a young Schueller sat at his family's kitchen table trying to develop the first harmless artificial hair dye. The tale of how L'Oréal went from that point to the world's largest cosmetics company is fascinating and full of intrigue, with a little of everything: fascist assassins, bitter unmaskings, political scandals. In 1988, although Schueller and Rubinstein had long since passed away, their worlds collided when L'Oréal bought Rubinstein's company — leading to a series of scandals that threw a new and sinister light on L'Oréal. For starters, Rubinstein was Jewish, but Schueller and many other top L'Oréal executives had been active Nazi collaborators. What came to light threatened the reputations of some of France's most powerful men - up to and including its president. This is a powerful, dramatic, and largely untold story about the ugly truth behind a beauty empire.
Between the 1780s and the end of the nineteenth century, an army of sad women took up residence in other people's homes, part and yet not part of the family, not servants, yet not equals. To become a governess, observed Jane Austen in Emma, was to "retire from all the pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope, to penance and mortification for ever." However, in an ironic paradox, the governess, so marginal to her society, was central to its fiction-partly because governessing was the fate of some exceptionally talented women who later wrote novels based on their experiences. But personal experience was only one source, and writers like Wilkie Collins, William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry James, and Jane Austen all recognized that the governess's solitary figure, adrift in the world, offered more novelistic scope than did the constrained and respectable wife. Ruth Brandon weaves literary and social history with details from the lives of actual governesses, drawn from their letters and journals, to craft a rare portrait of real women whose lives were in stark contrast to the romantic tales of their fictional counterparts. Governess will resonate with the many fans of Jane Austen and the Brontës, whose novels continue to inspire films and books, as well as fans of The Nanny Diaries and other books that explore the longstanding tension between mothers and the women they hire to raise their children.
The gripping story of Helena Rubinstein, EugÈne Schueller, and the dark side of the beauty business they helped to create Helena Rubinstein and L'OrÉal's EugÈne Schueller both started out in the beauty business during the first years of the twentieth century, and, by the time World War II broke out, had come to dominate it. However, their motivations could not have been more different. Rubinstein, a Polish Jew, claimed the world of paid work for women, and working women's enthusiasm for her products made her the first self-made female millionaire. Schueller, a French conservative in the Henry Ford mold, thought women belonged in the home, and during the Nazi Occupation he used his company as a source of cash to buy economic and political influence. Schueller eventually won the long fight for supremacy: in 1988 his company swallowed Rubinstein's. But the victory cost him his reputation when, in the wake of the takeover, he was exposed as a Nazi collaborator. Deepening the scandal, his wartime activities were shown to have been abetted and condoned by a cadre of young men who, by the time the news broke, had scaled the peaks of wealth and power in postwar France. By then Schueller and Rubinstein were both long dead. But cultural historian and biographer Ruth Brandon argues that the battle they began continues to this day. She examines their conflict to ask important contemporary questions about beauty standards and the often murky intersection of individual political aims and the role of business. Filled with remarkable twists, turns, and larger-than-life characters, Ugly Beauty is a riveting true story about what lies beneath the flawless exterior of the cosmetics industry.
A rich and fascinating account of the lives of Victorian governesses, exploring nineteenth-century attitudes to women, family and class. If a nineteenth century lady had neither a husband to support her nor money of her own, almost her only recourse was to live in someone else's household and educate their children - in particular, their daughters. Marooned within the confines of other people's lives, neither servants nor family members, governesses occupied an uncomfortable social limbo. And being poor and insignificant, their papers were mostly lost. But a few journals and letters have come down to us, giving a vivid record of what it was to be a lone professional woman at a time when such a creature officially did not exist.
Dr Reggie Lee, newly arrived at the National Gallery, is putting together a small exhibition around three Caravaggios depicting 'St Cecilia and the Angel.' One is at the Getty, one at the Louvre, and she hopes it won't be too hard to track down the third. But a series of inexplicable obstacles keep getting in her way - and then, unexpectedly, a fourth Caravaggio turns up. One of them must be a fake. But which? When people start to die, it seems clear that someone doesn't want Reggie's show to go ahead. Why, she can't imagine. But her career is at stake, and she'd damned if she'll let herself be intimidated and bullied by these unseen forces. So Reggie investigates and her research takes her from Surrealist suicides to shady Italian art dealers, from seventeenth-century painting techniques to modern French politics in a viciously-fought Presidential election year. By the end it seems as though nobody in the opaque and ill-defined world of art can really stay incorruptible - perhaps not even Reggie herself.
If my story touches your heart, its not because of me. It is because our God wanted to use my pain and suffering from long ago to change a life in the right now, to change it from the inside out, and to make it new and shining and bright, with a value far beyond your wildest dreams and imagination. This story is true! Its about God, who is real and wants you to be Hisall you are and all you have!
In 1913 Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase exploded through the American art world. This is the story of how he followed the painting to New York two years later, enchanted the Arensberg salon, and—almost incidentally—changed art forever. In 1915, a group of French artists fled war-torn Europe for New York. In the few months between their arrival—and America’s entry into the war in April 1917—they pushed back the boundaries of the possible, in both life and art. The vortex of this transformation was the apartment at 33 West 67th Street, owned by Walter and Louise Arensberg, where artists and poets met nightly to talk, eat, drink, discuss each others’ work, play chess, plan balls, organise magazines and exhibitions, and fall in and out of love. At the center of all this activity stood the mysterious figure of Marcel Duchamp, always approachable, always unreadable. His exhibit of a urinal, which he called Fountain, briefly shocked the New York art world before falling, like its perpetrator, into obscurity. Many people (of both sexes) were in love with Duchamp. Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood were among them; they were also, briefly, and (for her) life-changingly, in love with each other. Both kept daily diaries, which give an intimate picture of the events of those years. Or rather two pictures—for the views they offer, including of their own love affair, are stunningly divergent. Spellbound by Marcel follows Duchamp, Roché, and Beatrice as they traverse the twentieth century. Roché became the author of Jules and Jim, made into a classic film by François Truffaut. Beatrice became a celebrated ceramicist. Duchamp fell into chess-playing obscurity until, decades later, he became famous for a second time—as Fountain was elected the twentieth century’s most influential artwork.
During the first half of the 19th century, Alexis Soyer became the most famous cook -and man-in London. In addition to his kitchen inventions and best-selling cookbooks, Soyer was part of many of the great events and social changes of his time. In her exciting biography of a culinary giant, Ruth Brandon uses each phase of his legendary career to explore a different aspect of 19th-century life, including the destruction of the English peasantry, the Irish potato famine, and Britain's disastrous involvement in the Crimea. Born in France, Soyer moved to England in his teens and rose to early fame as head chef at London's Reform Club, where he designed a kitchen so innovative that it became a tourist attraction. He opened London's first French restaurant, and was linked to some of the most famous actresses and dancers of the day. Yet for all his flamboyance, Soyer's fame lies in the work he did for those in need. He wrote cookbooks for the poor and designed a model soup-kitchen during the Irish famine. He traveled to the Crimea to manage the kitchens in Florence Nightingale's hospital, and invented a battlefield cook-stove that remained in use as recently as the Gulf War. Soyer's influence remains today with three of his books still in print. The People's Chef at long last pays tribute to this remarkable man who had such a profound effect on 19thcentury society.
In a series of explorations both historical and actual, Automobile follows the cars momentous journey as it shapes the twentieth century, and sets the terms for the twenty-first. Starting from the Paris of the first road races, Ruth Brandon travels to Frds Detroit, to the Berlin of Hitlers Volkswagen dream, the Belfast field where John DeLoreans fantasy briefly came to life, ending up in automobile apotheosis: the Los Angeles freeways. Along the way, she pauses to consider the cars effect on urban planning and the environment, politics, gender wars, advertising, design, music, fashion and art.
Bring Hope, Faith, and Love to Your Relationships. The biblical character of Ruth was striking in her capacity to bring life to her relationships. Even in the midst of tragedy and difficulty, her presence blessed and influenced friends and strangers in her community, the man she grew to love, her children, and her in-laws. This six-week Fisherman Bible Studyguide uses Ruth's story to help you reflect on your own relationships and the ways in which God might be inviting you to move different ways--ways that will lead you into life-giving patterns of relating with others. Fisherman Bible Studyguides offer: * Penetrating questions that generate discussion * Flexible format for group or individual needs * Helpful leader’s notes * Emphasis on daily application of Bible truth
Bring Hope, Faith, and Love to Your Relationships. The biblical character of Ruth was striking in her capacity to bring life to her relationships. Even in the midst of tragedy and difficulty, her presence blessed and influenced friends and strangers in her community, the man she grew to love, her children, and her in-laws. This six-week Fisherman Bible Studyguide uses Ruth's story to help you reflect on your own relationships and the ways in which God might be inviting you to move different ways--ways that will lead you into life-giving patterns of relating with others. Fisherman Bible Studyguides offer: * Penetrating questions that generate discussion * Flexible format for group or individual needs * Helpful leader’s notes * Emphasis on daily application of Bible truth
Helen Bartram, in Los Angeles to work on a screenplay, sees her daughter Laura who died nine years ago. She knows she isn't mistaken and embarks on a 30-year search for her lost daughter which takes her across two continents. This novel is by the author of Tickling the Dragon.
Despite the large and ever-growing investment in pharmaceutical R&D, the number of innovative new medicines that meet significant unmet medical needs has been stagnant, if not declining. There are many potential reasons for this low return on pharmaceutical R&D investment, but one likely cause is the low probability of the success of clinical trials, particularly in early clinical development. Translational science, which we define as identifying the ‘right’ patient for the ‘right’ drug at the ‘right’ dose, promises to improve not only the odds of success of clinical development, but perhaps more importantly, to get the right drug to the right patient, thereby sparing those patients who may be less likely to benefit from a new therapeutic. We believe that this goal can be achieved by putting the patient first, i.e., by investing in understanding of disease heterogeneity at the molecular level, and then tailoring new therapeutics to subsets of patients. Using examples from the literature and our own experience, we describe current and emerging translational approaches that employ genomic and genetic methods in the areas of cancer, inflammation, and metabolic and infectious disease to this end. We use simple simulations to demonstrate how such translational strategies can significantly reduce the size of clinical trials or increase the likelihood of success of early phase trials. We end by discussing genomic approaches to understand adverse drug reactions.
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