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 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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