Although in the end there were aggressive paparazzi-buzzards on motorcycles (one named Rat), Diana's `welding of fairytale...
The queen of biography (Streisand, 1996, etc.) outflashes the paparazzi in this life of the late Princess of Wales.
Edwards has made her mark with 14 previous biographies, including several monarchs from Britain and American royals like Hepburn and the aforementioned Streisand. The author lived in England for decades and worked up Buckingham Palace contacts, archives, and historical background. An instabook would begin with the Ritz, Dodi, the Mercedes, and the 13th pillar of the Alma tunnel, but Edwards takes us back to Diana's ancestors to feel the weight of being a Spencer. When Diana is just a lass, before uncontrollable bouts of bulimia and love, she has `eating binges [because] she was starved of affection.` Edwards additionally lets us meet young Charles, taken with the Australian Kanga[JU: WHAT IS THIS?]prior to his lifelong obsession for making love and hunting with the older Camilla, married with children. Preceding Charles's marriage of convenience, Diana loses weight from anxiety. Edwards defends Diana's decision to marry as romantic optimism, though Charlie was missing the first morning after. `Charles thought he had married a demure deb, but Diana harbored a cache of emotions straight out of Emily Brontë.` Di was justifiably vengeful of the frigid royals, believes Edwards, who contends her subject truly became a princess once she left the palace. Her many hospital visits to land-mine or AIDS patients were, admits Edwards, part photo op yet part sincere. Ironically, Diana coveted the media savvy of John F. Kennedy Jr. (Edwards reveals how cannily Diana used her unauthorized biography); she also met Mother Teresa (whose funeral she upstaged with her own).
Although in the end there were aggressive paparazzi-buzzards on motorcycles (one named Rat), Diana's `welding of fairytale and soap opera` was an amazingly human story and provides a most nontabloid biography. (16-page b&w photo insert)Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-25314-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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