With gaspworthy and laugh-out-loud moments revealing scandalous and sympathetic details of the royal family, Andersen...
A conjecture of what the future holds for the British monarchy, combining the scholarship of a dissertation with the dishyness of a tabloid.
Readers will feel like a palace insider as former People senior editor Andersen (The Good Son: JFK and the Mother He Loved, 2014, etc.) begins with a vivid report of what he imagines will occur the day Queen Elizabeth II dies. Given his knowledge of every major and minor character involved, most readers will find the account wholly believable. From there, the book goes back in time, building on the perspectives (and schemes) of the women of the royal family. We get portraits of the duty-bound Queen Elizabeth, tragic and shattered Diana, calculating Camilla, and a not-so-coincidental Kate. The main question is, what will become of the monarchy? Will the queen abdicate at a certain time, as is the custom for other European monarchs? Will the late Diana get her wish, with the crown skipping Prince Charles in favor of William? Will the Prince of Wales break his promise and crown his second wife queen rather than consort? The guessing game is intriguing but not nearly as fascinating as what Andersen tells us about these women’s pasts: Camilla’s involvement in selecting Diana to marry Charles, Diana’s paranoia, and Carole Middleton’s exhaustive efforts to put her daughter in the future king’s bed. (When William decided on a university, Carole “flew to Florence to persuade her in person that St. Andrews offered something no other university in the world offered: proximity to the future King of England.”) The future Queen Catherine’s story, alas, seems less a fairy tale and more a calculation, just like all the rest of the players on the royal stage.
With gaspworthy and laugh-out-loud moments revealing scandalous and sympathetic details of the royal family, Andersen humanizes this privileged yet embattled group.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4395-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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