Sure to stir controversy in England and titillate Anglophiles everywhere with its tawdry, even pathetic, pandering to...
Princess Di’s onetime lover spills all.
Remember James Hewitt? He’s the handsome military man and polo player who romanced Diana while giving her riding lessons. Here, he explains that when he met the princess, the royal marriage had already begun to fall apart. Charles had taken up with Camilla again, Diana was battling bulimia, and Hewitt became confidant, hero and beloved to the princess during a five-year affair. After it ended, Hewitt was frustrated that he had kept a low profile and still got a bum rap, while the royals told their stories to the media. So he responded positively, if warily, when journalist Anna Pasternak asked him to give interviews for a biography. As Hewitt tells it, he was hoodwinked. Pasternak’s publishers made her tart up a tame account and publish something steamier. The result was Princess in Love, a book, declares Hewitt, “which I have never read but which has been a cross I have had to bear.” His participation in Pasternak’s project didn’t endear him to British society, and when he took up after Di’s death with a woman who eventually stole some of the princess’s letters to him, the resulting tabloid feeding frenzy and paparazzi-fest only made Hewitt further persona non grata. Here, he attempts to rehabilitate his image. After chapters detailing his romance with Diana, he “explains” the sordid mess with the stolen letters. Then he recounts his efforts to move on, becoming a minor star on the reality TV circuit in such hits as The Games, The Penthouse (“I had to spend twenty-four hours locked up with Jodie Marsh—not the most penitential experience!”) and Back to Reality. Oh, there was also the much-publicized arrest for cocaine possession, but that was just a mix-up, Hewitt assures us.
Sure to stir controversy in England and titillate Anglophiles everywhere with its tawdry, even pathetic, pandering to royalty voyeurs.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-85782-547-0
Page Count: 365
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
