Parker's previous book about royalty, on the Duke of Windsor (King of Fools, 1989), was a gossipy quick read, but Prince Philip makes for a tamer subject with less egregiously dirty laundry. Born in Greece in 1921 to German/Danish royalty, Philip was raised largely by relatives, including his mother's brother, Lord Mountbatten, who urged him to enroll in the Royal Naval College- -where he first met then-Princess Elizabeth. Although the relationship that would develop over many years was said to be ``true love,'' during his wife's first pregnancy the Prince caused a minor scandal by frequenting men's clubs and nightclubs. When Elizabeth became queen, Philip spent much time traversing the globe; he was shooting crocodile and touring Antarctica, for instance, while Britain was facing the Suez Canal crisis. When a friend resigned a palace post under reports of adultery, the tabloid buzz was that Philip and Elizabeth's marriage was also in trouble—but together they remain. So what's here of the promised secret life? Not much. Parker (Five for Hollywood, 1991) reports affairs and a possible illegitimate child, but he depends heavily on printed sources, offers little flavor of the prince's alleged naughty leanings, and pads his account with tedious filler (endless genealogy, long discussions of Philip's charitable works). Of interest to the royalty-obsessed only. (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-06444-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
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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