Superficial and indulgent, the book still manages to promote the princes as possibly worthy future leaders.
In her debut, Daily Mail on Sunday royal correspondent Nicholl zooms in on House of Windsor Princes William and Harry.
Beginning with the birth of the elder William in 1982, the author covers all the major events of the princes’ lives up to the present. She mostly colors in their childhood with the idiosyncrasies of their mother, the late Diana: her quest to deviate from royal tradition, giving birth in a hospital and hiring young nannies, and her eschewing her sovereign kin, preferring to shop, watch soaps and gab on the telephone. The media’s chronicling of the unhappiness between Diana and Charles and Diana’s tragic demise comprise the drama of the princes’ formative years. The ability of classmates to follow their family saga compounded the princes’ suffering, especially William’s. Though their bodyguards sat at the back of the classroom or on the sidelines of the football field, the princes mostly fit in at school like anyone else. Nicholl describes William as the scholar and Harry as the prankster, but she extols them both as lushly romantic figures, mentioning numerous heiresses who caught their eye, including William and Harry’s relationships with long-term girlfriends, Kate Middleton and Chelsy Davy, respectively. Nicholl unearths little about key friendships, and the only mentors she names are father, Prince Charles, and grandparents, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. Adulthood brings boozing and clubbing amid harsh military training, since both princes joined the armed forces in hopes of reaching the front lines; Harry helped thwart two attacks in Afghanistan. With tabloid relish, Nicholl cuts from military feats to public blunders that incited obloquy: William flying a service jet to visit his girlfriend and Harry donning a Nazi costume at a birthday party. The author finishes on a high note, commending the princes’ public service and speculating on when William will propose to Middleton.
Superficial and indulgent, the book still manages to promote the princes as possibly worthy future leaders.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60286-140-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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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