Books about Supermodels from Amazon.com

A rollicking memoir by one of the greatest (and most outrageous) supermodels of the 1970s.

Janice Dickinson was not only the first of the supermodels, she endured a nightmarishly traumatic childhood at the hands of a sadistic, sexually and emotionally abusive father, and emerged in the early 1970s as the first lush–lipped 'exotic' brunette to break into a modelling world dominated by sunny California blondes.

Janice owned the modelling world in the 1970s. Animated by a fierce desire to be recognised, a fearless spirit, and an insatiable hunger for alcohol, cocaine, sex, and fun, Dickinson appeared on every magazine cover, worked with every major designer and photographer (from Calvin Klein and Gianni Versace to Helmut Newton and Richard Avedon), was married three times, and had passionate affairs or one–night stands with everyone from Warren Beatty to Jack Nicholson to Mick Jagger. Though her career waned in the 1990s, her dramatic life story did not: in recent years she has fought a hotly contested paternity suit with Sylvester Stallone, survived a near–fatal car wreck during a tequila/marijuana blackout in St Bart's, and waged a raging battle with alcohol and drug addiction.

Since the day she was scouted by a modeling agent while shopping at a London street fair when she was just nineteen, Alek Wek's life has been nothing short of a fantasy When she's not the featured model in print campaigns for hip companies, or gracing the cover of Elle, she is working the runways of Paris, New York, and Milan to model for the world's leading designers, including Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel. But nothing in her early years prepared her for the life of a model.

Born in Wau, in the southern Sudan, Alek knew only a few years of peace with her family before they were caught up in a ruthless civil war that pitted outlaw militias, the Muslim-dominated government, and southern rebels against each other in a brutal conflict that killed nearly two million people. Here is her daring story of fleeing the war on foot and her escape to London, where her rise from young model to supermodel was all the more notable because of Alek's non-European looks.

A probe into the Sudanese conflict and an inside look into the life of a most unique supermodel, Alek is a book that will inspire as well as inform.