Thing of Beauty
Posted by admin | Posted in HIV | Posted on 20-08-2010
5
Product Description
A portrait of the tragic life and death of supermodel Gia Carangi chronicles her discovery and rise to the heights of the fashion world, her descent into drug addiction, and her death of AIDS at the age of twenty-six.Amazon.com Review
Trashy celebrity bios are usually diminished by the fact that we’ve already heard the stories about Lonnie and Burt, or Madonna and Sean, or whoever the current target is. Author Stephen Fried manages to get all the sleaze value plus a lot of surprises by choosing supermodel Gia Carangi as his topic. Although her face is widely recognized, Gia finished her modeling career in a blaze of heroin and disease just before the time when models became celebrities with name recognition. Her life is the perfect fodder for the exploitation market, but Fried goes beyond that with fluid prose and a reporter’s nose for tracking down sources. His stories about her teenage years, with their mix of late nights in Philadelphia’s gay clubs, manic worship, and glam-style imitation of David Bowie, as well as tales of Gia’s ability to seduce her friends, male and female, are the product of a lot of work and make for very interesting reading. Gia’s unabashed homosexuality and early death from AIDS make her story a palimpsest of life on the edge in the America of the 1980s.
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I thought this book was a great read, unfortunatlly Gia is no longer with us.
Rating: 5 / 5
I bought the book the other and I read in less than one night I cried so much after reading it HBO was so right to let Angelina Jolie play the self-destructive Ms. Carangi it’s sad how she was in a body bag at age 26 from AIDS I could feel her family’s pain she would’ve been 40 this coming January. Kat, your daughter was very beautiful it’s unfortunate that she’s not in this world anymore. Gia Marie Carangi 1960-1999 R.I.P. Beautiful Girl.
Rating: 5 / 5
I am a certified Social Worker with a Masters Degree in Social Work. In my practice I have had numerous clients with an array of problems including substance abuse and AIDS. I feel that the real tragedy is that because Gia was a beautiful, famous model, the book basically excused her despicable behavior by implying that she was a product of her family’s “dysfunction”. The author refers time and again to the break up of Gia’s parents as the root of Gia’s problems. The author also reports that she had “no support” from friends and family as her addiction took hold and basically destroyed her. The fact of the matter is that Gia came from a broken family, like many others, but instead of dealing with her problems she took the self indulgence route. This book portrays Gia as a spoiled, selfish, iresponsible person who had everything but wanted more. She used the modeling industry as much as they used her. She was getting paid, wasn’t she? Since when is it an employers job to make sure you ‘re ok? If you don’t do what you’re hired to do you get fired. That’s life. It’s a shame to see anyone so young lose their life. But she died as a direct result of how she lived. It was nobody’s fault but Gia’s. I had a patient who was raised alone by her mother on welfare. At 18 yrs. old she went in search of her father. She found him and being a drug addict proceeded to introduce her to cocaine. He then raped her and she became pregnant with his child. She also contracted AIDS. She was on welfare and truly alone in the world. Every day is a struggle for her. I don’t see anyone writing a book about her life or lending her support. Now that is what I call a true tragedy.
Rating: 1 / 5
Wow. People have told me about Gia for a while now, because of my looks, I never knew she was a woman of such perplexity, and I finally saw what they were talking about. This woman was of many facets, and upon reading this book, despite all the excess talk of living in the 70’s and 80’s, I did find a side to Gia that I had been yearning for. The book is insightful, yet there is a lot of babble of the NY and French fashion scene, which is interesting, but that isn’t why we buy the book. Very emotional near the end, I found a woman that I look enough like to be her daughter had a spirit that still lives on.
Rating: 4 / 5
No one can say that the life of Gia Carangi wasn’t tragically fascinating–especially the author of this book. Unfortunately it takes him around the corner to the milk store and back until he makes his point. This book is over 400 pages long, and although it’s well-written and documented, it could have been at least 100 pages shorter. Stephen Fried has definitely done his homework, but this book feels more like a documentary of the 70’s fashion world than a biography of Gia. He goes a bit overboard in detailing EVERY SINGLE person in Gia’s life and it gets frustrating for the reader who really doesn’t care much about every hairdresser, photographer or lunch lady that ever entered Gia’s life.
For those of you out there that are interested in every aspect of 70’s fashion–read this book, you’ll love it. For those of you who could care less–you might want to skip this one.
Rating: 2 / 5