A thorough, timely biography of the man likely to become king in the next decade or so.
A sympathetic psychological study of the prince who has been working tirelessly all his life to be taken seriously.
Having written previously on other members of the modern English dynasty (Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch, 2012, etc.), British biographer Smith provides plenty of astute observations in her biography of the Prince of Wales, who is now 68. His 90-year-old mother, Queen Elizabeth II, is finally slowing down and deputizing some of her tasks to her eldest son, although she has no intention of abdicating. After espousing vociferously and often controversially throughout his life on causes he is passionate about—organic farming and other environmental issues, traditional architecture versus modern, creating opportunity and education for disadvantaged youth, alternative medicine and homeopathy, among many others—Charles seems to be toning down his rhetoric in preparation for the establishment of a more disciplined tone, à la his efficient, well-loved mother. Smith is not the first biographer to depict the young prince as love-starved, lonely, and emotionally vulnerable, although her portrait is enormously touching and supported by wide-ranging interviews and research. Elizabeth’s hands-off approach to child-raising, Charles’ father’s bullying, the hypercriticism of the press, and his position of impotence within the royal succession all colluded in pushing him into a disastrous first marriage with a far-too-young, inexperienced, and emotionally damaged soul, Diana Spencer. In fact, he always loved and needed the one woman who bolstered his confidence, listened to him, and shared his pursuits, the married Camilla Parker-Bowles. Indeed, Smith portrays Camilla in a very generous light and Diana as seriously psychologically impaired. Throughout, the author traces the roots of Charles’ many fascinating and beneficial "obsessions"; he was a prescient prince who scorned the playboy label and tried valiantly to do something good with his wealth and connections.
A thorough, timely biography of the man likely to become king in the next decade or so.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6790-9
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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