An engrossing character study of the beautiful, brave, but psychologically bent princess who became an icon, by Vanity Fair contriduting editor Smith. Diana, her family, her friends, and the media who dogged her seemed bent on denying the serious emotional problems that shaped her private and sometimes public actions. According to Smith (Reflected Glory: The Life of Pamela Churchill Harriman, 1996), Diana almost certainly suffered from borderline personality disorder, a psychiatric diagnosis characterized by feelings of inferiority, dependence, and confusion about identity. Borderline personalities are often “self-destructive, easily depressed, panicky and volatile,” while superficially “charming, insightful, witty, and lively.” As revealed in this profile, backed by archival research and personal interviews, Diana was all of the above and more. Given to bulimia, self-mutilation, lies, and suicide attempts through most of her adult life, Diana’s problems began at six years old when her “childhood was shattered” by her parents’ separation; the pressure of her royal engagement brought all her insecurities to the surface. Charles was unable, although at first not unwilling, to cope. He arranged psychiatric counseling several times, to no avail. In 1985, Diana took the first of a series of lovers, and Charles turned to Camilla; envy, vengeance, pride, fear, rage, despair , and ignorance all played roles in the divorce that followed, says Smith. She maintains an even keel in assessing the princess, giving credit for her genuine devotion to her children as well as her warmth, compassion, and generosity. The author also acknowledges Charles for trying, if ineffectually, to help his wife, while indicting the British tabloid press for using her to sell newspapers. Probably not the definitive study (many witnessses to Diana’s life are still unwilling to talk on the record), but an informed and astute appraisal of the 20th century’s possibly most celebrated celebrity. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen) (First serial to People magazine; Literary Guild selection; author tour; TV satellite tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8129-3030-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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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