An endlessly provocative and deliciously scandalous book for royal watchers.
Sensationalistic snippets from the life of a royal princess.
In this biographical montage of Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon (1930-2002), Daily Mail columnist Brown (Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings, 2012, etc.) reflects on the true nature of her regal life and loves. The author’s “appetite for royal kitsch” surely fueled the culling of the book’s material, which ranges from both adulating and scathing biographies to the letters and diaries of, among others, Peter Sellers and Gore Vidal. Brown lays bare the facets of Margaret’s notoriously sharp-tongued personality, often abrasive behavior, affinity for well-heeled bohemia, and rumored sexual affairs. The author spares little in his scrutiny as the references hopscotch from the ubiquitous mentions of Margaret’s name in notable texts and palace announcements to the post-mortem sale pricing of her jewelry collection. In a moment of parody, one of Brown’s specialties, he hilariously imagines Margaret’s marriage to Pablo Picasso. Many particularly scandalous chapters feature essays, opinions, and interview snippets categorizing Margaret as either an aloof snob who “turned pickiness into an art form” or a smug brat whose self-superiority and “snappiness was instinctive and unstoppable, like a nervous twitch.” Collectively, the narrative creates a brutally honest yet dramatically unflattering portrait of Margaret’s regal sybaritic lifestyle, her legacy of boorish behavior, and the competitiveness and outspokenness that doomed her friendships and her stormy marriage to Lord Snowdon. While savory overall, the onslaught of dishy details bends beneath its own weight in the book’s final third. Fusing facts with fancifulness, Brown’s barbed, devilishly entertaining narrative exposes Margaret for the majesty she embodied and, to some, consistently tarnished, but the author barely contributes to explanations as to why she felt so “hurt by life” and behaved accordingly. Biographer Hugo Vickers opined that the difficult Queen Mother–Princess daughter relationship was the glaring culprit.
An endlessly provocative and deliciously scandalous book for royal watchers.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-90604-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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