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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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