Ratings2
Average rating3.5
The instant New York Times bestseller Supermodel and philanthropist Gisele Bündchen shares personal stories, insights, and photos to explore lessons that have helped shape her life. Gisele Bündchen's journey began in southern Brazil, growing up with five sisters, playing volleyball, and rescuing the dogs and cats around her hometown. In fact, she wanted to become either a professional volley player or a veterinarian. But at the age of 14, fate suddenly intervened in in the form of a modeling scout, who spotted her in São Paulo. Four years later, Gisele's appearance in Alexander McQueen's memorably rain-soaked London runway show in the spring 1998 launched her spectacular career as a fashion model, and put an end to the "heroin chic" era of fashion. Since then, Gisele has appeared in almost 400 ad campaigns and on over 1200 magazine covers. She has walked in more than 470 fashion shows for the most influential brands in the world. Gisele has become an icon, leaving a lasting mark on the fashion industry. But until now, few people have gotten to know the real Gisele, a woman whose private life stands in dramatic contrast to her public image. In Lessons, she reveals for the first time who she really is and what she's learned over the past 37 years to help her live a meaningful life--a journey that takes readers from a childhood spent barefoot in small-town Brazil, to an internationally successful career, motherhood and marriage to quarterback Tom Brady. A work of great openness and vulnerability, Lessons reveals the inner life of a very public woman.
Reviews with the most likes.
I picked up this book on a whim without reading the back cover and it was not what I was expecting, but in the best way. Rather than it being a memoir of the more glamorous parts of her life and her experiences, it is a glimpse into who she is and how she has navigated a complicated and extraordinary career and life while dealing with things that many of us can relate to. She mentions in the beginning of the book that she wanted to write about her real life and not the celebrity ‘her', and she succeeds at that. This was a worthwhile read!
Spread out over the eight chapters, Bündchen delivers a mish mash of a biography and life advice for us all, and arguably I think it's perhaps aimed more towards women than men, even though what she does impart is applicable for both.
What I did enjoy is that for someone who has played a stereotype, the supermodel, who publicly usually says very little - Gisele's advice comes from the heart and she means well by it all, having gone through some trying times in her early career.
If the book is filed under biographies, then perhaps it's not as deep on this label as I would have liked it to have been, as the timeframes are not particularly chronological.
The end result is a quick and easy read, and Bündchen writes what could be best be described as a self help book with a strong autobiographical element and hey, it is a comfort to see that even the rich and successful have problems like the rest of us.
The question is that will 2019 make (m)any of us brave enough to sort ourselves out?