Swans and Pistols
Modeling, Motherhood, and Making It in the Me Generation
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Fashion icon, Broadway and Hollywood insider, mob mistress, confidante to notorious gang members of both Crips and Bloods, wife, mother, award-winning journalist, Léon Bing has not followed the typical path through life. From her formative relationship with her mother to her days as a star model to her sisterly relationship with Mama Cass Elliot and ultimate reinvention as the author of the bestselling gang exposé, Do or Die, Swans and Pistols details Bing's always exciting and sometimes dangerous life. In a series of riveting stories of unconventionality, Bing wrestles with the themes of mothers, daughters, and reinvention-a concept inseparable from the experience of her early adult life in the 1960s and the city she called home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Everyone may have a story in them, but the memoir of former 1960s model-turned-journalist Bing raises the question: does every story need to be told? Bing, who wrote the award-winning gang expos Do or Die, is less successful at turning her journalist's eye on her own life. The book starts slowly with exposition-heavy memories of her childhood, in which she was raised by her wealthy grandparents and saw her aloof mother only on weekends. The book takes on color when Bing begins to work as a runway model in New York, mainly because of the high-profile people who populate her stories, from mobster Micky Cohen to director Mike Nichols and composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. In fact, the book is a name-dropping delight, full of brushups with the rich and famous Bing had a several years' long affair with artist Ed Ruscha, was close friends with Mama Cass and hobnobbed with plenty of actors. While Bing can turn a lovely phrase and displays intelligence, the book is so outwardly focused that Bing herself seems merely a bit player in her own life. The book really comes alive near the end when curiosity about homeless kids in Venice, Calif., leads her to write an article that unexpectedly launches her journalism career.
