A fairly evenhanded portrait sure to please fans of the royal-family genre.
The British celebrity biographer and dogged royal watcher examines the relationship between Queen Elizabeth II (b. 1926) and her only sister, Princess Margaret (1930-2002).
At the risk of stating the obvious, fans of the Netflix series The Crown will be keen to devour Morton’s latest portrait of the royal family, following his 2018 book, Meghan: A Hollywood Princess. (The author has also written unauthorized biographies of Madonna, Tom Cruise, and Angelina Jolie.) Here, Morton focuses on the close relationship of the queen and her only sibling, who was both her closest supporter and sometime rival. From their earliest years, the two were rare peas in a royal pod. With their father’s unexpected accession to the throne as George VI, following Edward VIII’s scandalous abdication in 1936, the daughters became second and third in line to the throne. As in previous books on the royal family, the author captures their dramatic differences in temperament and character. Elizabeth was dutiful, shy, retiring, imperturbable, and content to embrace tradition and protocol; Margaret was theatrical, extroverted, individualistic, and self-indulgent. Their differences grew more pronounced over the years, even perilously so. Elizabeth dug into her role as queen with a dour sense of fatality while Margaret flaunted the royal boundaries at every turn. Morton focuses much attention on Margaret’s unraveling, as she continually fought against her sister’s staid public image and conventional marriage by capturing tabloid headlines in pursuit of “unsuitable” men—from the divorced, older Group Capt. Peter Townsend to the much younger Roddy Llewelyn. The author points out the double standard used against Margaret at the time, when “older women dating younger men had not yet been accepted by the mainstream.” Morton cruises through the events of the decades to create a smooth, composite portrait of the messy yet indissoluble bond between sisters.
A fairly evenhanded portrait sure to please fans of the royal-family genre.Pub Date: March 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5387-0046-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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