Yet another portrait of the British throne’s much-maligned heir, timed for His Royal Highness’s 50th birthday on November 14, from a top royal biographer who’s the author of several other books on Charles and Diana (Prince Charles, 1979, etc.). While Holden’s new portrait gives precedence to the prince’s private life, readers also get a fair overview of Charles’s various public initiatives, from the supervision of city planners and the founding of the ill-fated Institute of Architecture to his attack on the conventional medical establishment. Despite the author’s dry and often ironic tone, what he reveals about the prince’s endorsement of organic farming, vegetarianism, holistic healing, and environmental protection resonates with numerous concerns relevant for 1990s readers. Holden attributes Charles’s inability to express affection—the trait that was the cause of much pain to his late wife—to a childhood devoid of emotional contact with his parents: The prim and prudish Elizabeth II always valued public duty more than her maternal responsibilities. As a result, in one famous instance, Charles insisted on attending a Royal Opera House concert while his son William underwent surgery; the more motherly Diana kept vigil at the boy’s hospital bedside. Overall, Holden’s criticisms of the British royalty echo the recent mood of British taxpayers, tired of supporting an expensive monarchy that has lost even its symbolic status as the guardian of national moral and religious values. Charles’s adulterous relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles is one focus of the book; so are other royal sex scandals. Without taking sides, Holden portrays Diana sympathetically but also as a manipulator of public opinion and a master of intrigue. He credits the princess, nevertheless, with reforming the now-ever-so-slightly-more-human royal family. Replete with quotes from anonymous confidants and sundry royal “lunch guests,” Holden’s opus will find favor with all lovers of the never-ending Windsor soap opera. (32 pages color and b&w photos) (Radio and TV satellite tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-50175-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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