Hard on the heels of the death of one princess, Glatt gathers info and gossip about the world’s other favorite princess, Grace Kelly of Monaco, and her three rebellious children, Prince Albert and Princesses Caroline and Stephanie. It’s difficult to judge the merits of an exposÇ such as this one without looking at it in the context of current times. True, the seemingly fairy tale fate of glamorous Hollywood movie star Grace Kelly becoming Princess Grace of Monaco in 1956 offers the perfect fodder for an escapist read, but one still has to question Glatt’s (Lost in Hollywood: The Fast Times and Short Life of River Phoenix, 1995, etc.) timing. Short paragraphs and out-of-place comments seem inserted after-the-fact to connect the Monaco royals to Diana and capitalize on the current hot topic of paparazzi invasion. Whereas a biography of a deceased public figure doesn—t necessarily have to become tabloid material, Glatt focuses his on the remarkably irresponsible behavior and embarrassingly ill-informed choices made by Monaco’s ruling family after the death of Princess Grace. This direction taints Glatt’s intentions (whatever they may really be) with a gossipy cast. The author did obtain the cooperation of Prince Albert and others close to the family, but that doesn—t necessarily transform his book from a gratuitous ogling into an enlightening explanation of their tragic misfortune. As for the writing, Glatt repeats himself: several anecdotes and quotes show up again and again in only slightly different form. However, for what it’s worth, Glatt understands how to string together a ton of minute, only momentarily intriguing details into an action-packed, larger-than-life TV movie of the week. For those interested in glimpsing how royalty live, this is probably, and perhaps regrettably, a winner.
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-19326-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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