A witty, colorful portrait of Camilla as human that should offer food for thought for Anglophiles and those seeking an...
The first full-length biography of one of Britain’s more reviled public figures.
In this richly detailed look at Camilla Parker Bowles (b. 1947), prolific royal family chronicler Junor (Prince Harry: Brother, Soldier, Son, 2014, etc.) adds to her growing library of portraits of members of the household of the Prince of Wales. For many readers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the Duchess of Cornwall is a woman with a past in need of redemption. Cast widely in the press as the dissembling “other woman” responsible for the dissolution of Charles’ marriage to the hugely popular Diana Spencer, Camilla is portrayed here as the opposite: a playful, self-effacing pillar of strength and kindness who is “unwavering in her support” of her husband and family. The author tips her hat to her subject early on, writing, “when history comes to judge her, Camilla will not be seen as the woman who nearly brought down the House of Windsor” but rather “recognised as the woman who shored it up.” Admitting that Camilla “will never be universally loved because of the early scandal,” Junor makes the compelling case that she “came into Charles’s broken marriage and gave him something to live for when he was in despair.” Mercifully, though, much of the author’s portrait attends to Camilla in her own right. Junor shows how Camilla’s upper-class upbringing and identification with her war-hero father formed her character and aspirations, influenced her pursuit of and first marriage to the philandering Andrew Parker Bowles, and affected her actions now as a “thoroughly grounded,” philanthropic, devoted mother and grandmother who just happened to fall in love with the heir apparent to the British throne.
A witty, colorful portrait of Camilla as human that should offer food for thought for Anglophiles and those seeking an antidote to her toxic reputation.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-247110-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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