A premature biography that will interest devoted royal watchers.
A look at how the rascally fourth in line to the British throne has been forgiven youthful indiscretions but faces serious career decisions at age 30.
English journalist and royal biographer Junor (Prince William, 2012, etc.) certainly knows her way around the royal PR office; she’s written about the rest of the family, so why not Prince Harry? In approaching this second Windsor son—beloved yet mischievous, a somewhat reckless rugby player and thrill-seeking Apache pilot—the author tries to establish her journalistic objectivity in the first paragraph by addressing his recent fall from grace, when he was caught on camera playing strip billiards with a bunch of young ladies in a Las Vegas hotel room. “It was probably a classic example of me probably being too much Army and not enough prince,” he remarked wryly. Yet Junor is sympathetic to this strawberry-blond athlete of charming mien and winning ways: He’s “impulsive, unpredictable and dangerous,” she says, but that’s his “genius.” Genius or not, he didn’t attend university like his older brother, William, but opted for Sandhurst military academy after Eton, having become enamored as a child by soldier play and spectacle at the annual Royal Tournament with his mother, Princess Diana. His early life with Diana was both deliciously magical and weirdly unnatural, since the Wales’ marriage went sour early on; Junor squarely blames Diana for the emotional turmoil in the house(s) and the comings and goings of various male visitors she did not hide. Recently, Harry has moved out of his brother’s shadow, embracing some good causes approved of by his father. For instance, in 2006 he helped establish Sentebale, which helps the “forgotten children” of AIDs-ravaged Lesotho, where he spent his gap year, and in 2012, he did energetic work as ambassador for his country at the London Olympics.
A premature biography that will interest devoted royal watchers.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1455549832
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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