Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein
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Book Reviews of Edie: American Girl
Book Review: BIography
Summary: 5 Stars
Book came very quickily (within 2 days) in excellent condition. I would buy from this resource again.Book Review: Miss Edie
Summary: 5 Stars
Her friends were fabulous, she was--- is thre any doubt her BIO would be?!Book Review: and i thought my family had issues....
Summary: 5 Stars
yikes. what a tragic tale. incredible book. incredibly sad.
Book Review: Extra-ordinary biography of a tragic figure
Summary: 4 Stars
Maybe I don't get out enough, but I have never read a biography like this one. Masterfully composed from hundreds of interviews with family and friends of Edie Sedgewick, the book paints a remarkably detailed, three dimensional picture of this charismatic and tragic child of the American aristocracy. The writing and editing are brilliant.
The chapters dedicated to family and interviews with family members are by far the most compelling. They describe the history, beginning in the 1700s, of a privileged aristocratic family and a generation that came to maturity in the 50s and 60s that descended into madness and self-destruction as a result of the cruelty and narcissism of their father and a genetic predisposition helped along by drugs and alcohol.
The chapters covering Edie's celebrity years in New York with Warhol, the Factory and the various hangers on that followed are boring and pathetic. While she was beautiful and charismatic, Edie at this stage had become a junkie and all junkie stories are pathetic and boring no matter how wonderful the true underlying personality is. Most of the interview quotes from this crowd are likewise boring and pathetic because they were drug-addled at the same time that Edie was and, frankly, these people just don't seem very thoughtful or articulate.
Edie's death from a drug overdose had a morbid inevitability about it and one can't help but feel a deep sadness that such a charismatic human being was destroyed by something so cheap and sordid as narcotics and the legions of so-called friends that egged her on. What's even more tragic to contemplate is the thousands of other young people, privileged and not, who met the same fate because drugs became glamorized during the 60s.
I picked this book up on a lark, having watched the movie "Factory Girl" and wanting to better understand this era. My expectations were low. However, once I started I couldn't put the book down. It's a brilliant and unique biography and well worth a read, though you may not enjoy the people who populate it.
Book Review: Tragic but transcendant
Summary: 4 Stars
I always noticed this book at my grandmother's place, but didn't recognise the name until last year, and I read this book in a matter of days. Edie's short life, as described in this convoluted biography induces both envy and pity, we envy the beautiful, spoilt celebrity at the centre of a wild hedonistic carnival, who seems to have everything and obey no-one, and we pity the poor lost soul who is used, abused, abandoned and maltreated at every turn. Edie's meteoric rise to instant stardom as the jewel in the crown of the 1960's Warhol empire is as tragic as it is thrilling, and the biography makes you feel every minute of it. This book brought me to tears twice and yet parts of it were so transcendant as to seem surreal, her life is still powerfully bright. The book is still really gripping and moving even though I was born almost three decades after her death and long after the end of the 60's. Somehow at every turn you hope Edie Sedgwick will pull herself together and pull through and you wish that everything told in the book will turn around but it never does, Edie seems to burn out before she'd even become a has-been.
I recommend this to anyone who's ever wondered what the 60's were like if you were famous and fabulous, or to anyone who wants to have a good cry.