Although in the end there were aggressive paparazzi-buzzards on motorcycles (one named Rat), Diana's `welding of fairytale...
The queen of biography (Streisand, 1996, etc.) outflashes the paparazzi in this life of the late Princess of Wales.
Edwards has made her mark with 14 previous biographies, including several monarchs from Britain and American royals like Hepburn and the aforementioned Streisand. The author lived in England for decades and worked up Buckingham Palace contacts, archives, and historical background. An instabook would begin with the Ritz, Dodi, the Mercedes, and the 13th pillar of the Alma tunnel, but Edwards takes us back to Diana's ancestors to feel the weight of being a Spencer. When Diana is just a lass, before uncontrollable bouts of bulimia and love, she has `eating binges [because] she was starved of affection.` Edwards additionally lets us meet young Charles, taken with the Australian Kanga[JU: WHAT IS THIS?]prior to his lifelong obsession for making love and hunting with the older Camilla, married with children. Preceding Charles's marriage of convenience, Diana loses weight from anxiety. Edwards defends Diana's decision to marry as romantic optimism, though Charlie was missing the first morning after. `Charles thought he had married a demure deb, but Diana harbored a cache of emotions straight out of Emily Brontë.` Di was justifiably vengeful of the frigid royals, believes Edwards, who contends her subject truly became a princess once she left the palace. Her many hospital visits to land-mine or AIDS patients were, admits Edwards, part photo op yet part sincere. Ironically, Diana coveted the media savvy of John F. Kennedy Jr. (Edwards reveals how cannily Diana used her unauthorized biography); she also met Mother Teresa (whose funeral she upstaged with her own).
Although in the end there were aggressive paparazzi-buzzards on motorcycles (one named Rat), Diana's `welding of fairytale and soap opera` was an amazingly human story and provides a most nontabloid biography. (16-page b&w photo insert)Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-25314-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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