A well-written, guilt-free treat for devoted royal family-watchers—whose numbers are, of course, legion.
A surprisingly fresh addition to the mountain of biographies of the late Princess of Wales—this one focusing on her relations with the Queen.
Seward, a longtime correspondent on matters royal and editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine (and, as it happens, the last journalist to interview Di), has obvious sympathy for the Princess. But she has greater sympathy, it would seem, for the long-suffering Queen Elizabeth II, who came to power in the shadow of scandal, worked for decades to give England a ruler of whom it could be proud—or, at least, not ashamed—and then had to endure the public posturings of her eldest son's petulant, bulimic, and generally uncooperative bride. (To her credit, as the author ably demonstrates, Di was nowhere near as awful as Fergie, who fueled Fleet Street tabloids with her self-serving antics.) Contending with Di (who emerges in these pages as both a confused, troubled soul and an extremely shrewd, self-aware schemer) could not have been very pleasant for the Queen, who was sometimes distant but even shrewder than her daughter-in-law (and, to gauge by Seward's account, a font of patience). Even so, the Queen seems to have acquired a little more humanity in grappling with Di's all-too-human troubles, “excusing her indiscretions, making allowance for her illness, overlooking her outbursts, taking note of her grievances, ignoring the way she tried to claim center stage,” and their 15-year-long association had tangible effects on the way the royal family conducts itself today (its budget downsized, for example, by a populist government that took Di's side in the long struggle for power that only ended with her death in 1997).
A well-written, guilt-free treat for devoted royal family-watchers—whose numbers are, of course, legion.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-561-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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