Barbara socialite full#

She was long known for her outspoken and vociferous support of the State of Israel. The first half of the book is devoted to Amiel’s life before Black’s downfall, where she recounts growing up in a British Jewish family before moving to Canada as a child, and always wearing “my tiny gold mezuzah” around her neck.Īmiel, who wrote a column at a variety of news outlets for close to 40 years, also served as the editor-in-chief of the Toronto Sun from 1983 to 1985. She casually muses about having journalists murdered, judges imprisoned and injecting “our persecutors” with the Ebola virus. federal prison - takes aim at all those who’ve wronged her in the book’s 600 pages, and tops it all off with a very literal list of, you guessed it, her friends and enemies.

Barbara socialite full#

But Friends and Enemies is chock full of anecdotes about everyone from Richard Gere to Elton John, Margaret Thatcher, Australian billionaire Kerry Packer and Amiel’s cousin, Israeli nuclear physicist Saadia Amiel.Īmiel - the wife of Conrad Black, the financier and former newspaper mogul who wound up in U.S.

It is rare to read a memoir that casually name drops eminent 16th-century Rabbi Moshe Isserles (a direct ancestor through Amiel’s mother), Princess Diana (a dinner party guest) and Henry Kissinger (a close friend). Equal parts self-deprecating and catty, Amiel details her sexual exploits, her multiple marriages, extravagant spending habits, drug abuse, plastic surgery and even her brief stint in a Mozambique prison in 1980. The salacious, biting and oftentimes rambling recounting of Amiel’s nearly 80 years on earth spares no detail, laying out her own foibles - as well as those of the people around her - in black and white. But never has Amiel - a self-proclaimed “scandalous ideological provocateur” - let loose quite as much as in her new memoir, out this week, titled Friends and Enemies: A Life in Vogue, Prison and Park Avenue.

The longtime columnist, socialite and tabloid mainstay has never been one to mince words.