Front Row: Anna Wintour: What Lies Beneath the Chic Exterior of Vogue's Editor in Chief » (Reprint)

Jerry Oppenheimer has been writing definitive, bestselling biographies of American icons since the mideighties. His subjects have included Martha Stewart, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Ethel Kennedy, Barbara Walters, Jerry Seinfeld, and Rock Hudson. He has worked in all facets of journalism, from national investigative reporting in Washington, D.C., to producing TV news and documentaries.

She's ambitious, driven, insecure, needy, a perfectionist—and she's considered the most powerful force in the more than $100 billion fashion industry. She's Anna Wintour, editor in chief of Vogue, the world's fashion bible. With her signature Louise Brooks bob, trademark sunglasses, and glamorous furs, she's a sexy international diva, gossiped about the world over. As famed designed Oscar de la Renta declares, "She's a star."

How did Wintour, who quit school over the length of her hemline, and who had no real writing or communication skills, rise to the pinnacle of the fashion magazine world? Based on scores of interviews with present and former friends and colleagues, Front Row is the scrupulously researched, often shocking life story of this enigmatic icon—a candid portrait of a fashion-obsessed teenager in Swinging Sixties London who claws her way up the ivory tower in New York. It is also an intimate examination of Wintour's personal passions and needs, her loves lost and won, and her feuds and achievements. Anna Wintour's story is an inside look at one of the world's most influential women as well as the catty, competitive bitch-eat-bitch world of fashion. Meow!

The Washington Post - Alexandra Jacobs

If only for its verisimilitude, Front Row is an infinitely more satisfying Wintour treatise than that limply plotted bestseller; if Weisberger's heroine had taken a week off to groove at a Bob Marley concert, no one would've believed it.