Though far from comprehensive, Mayer’s intriguing snapshot of Prince Charles reveals the often overlooked intricacies of his...
A brief biography of Britain’s famous king-in-waiting, Prince Charles.
The Prince of Wales has been a mainstay of international media for nearly his entire life. Between his tumultuous marriage to Princess Diana, which tragically culminated in a 1997 fatal car crash, and the nasty rumors that Charles is anxiously awaiting his mother’s death to ascend the throne, there has been no shortage of ink spilled over the prince. Yet despite his presence as a public figure, Charles has maintained a remarkably guarded life. Though he makes hundreds of appearances each year, from hosting world leaders to visiting local businesses across Britain, as a person, he is difficult to define. Longtime Time journalist Mayer has profiled dignitaries of all stripes, and here she sets out to dispel the prejudices dogging not only Charles, but also the institution of monarchy. Bad press and mismanagement have long plagued the Windsors, and politicians have routinely questioned the political and financial legitimacy of the royal family. Yet Prince Charles remains the family’s most active and public representative—for better or worse. Bucking the conventional linear narrative of traditional biographies, Mayer focuses her study of Charles on aspects of his character. Chief among them is his dedication to philanthropy and cultural initiatives. Charles was notably one of the first proponents of sustainable agriculture, environmental activism, and conservation in Britain, famously mentioning that he liked to walk through his garden and talk to his plants. He even founded one of the country’s first organic brands and published a manifesto called Harmony. Mayer also dives into the juicy bits such as family history and his marriage to Diana. Ultimately, she captures the contradiction between Charles’ traditional wisdom and progressive causes and illuminates a man perpetually caught in between the rule of royalty and his need to express himself as an individual.
Though far from comprehensive, Mayer’s intriguing snapshot of Prince Charles reveals the often overlooked intricacies of his personality.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62779-438-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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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