5 comments about Losing It: And Gaining My Life Back One Pound at a Time.

1. I was a Van Halen and One Day at a Time fan back in the day. I always wondered why this 20 year marriage broke up. The reasons are hardly shocking, but the author presents them in an interesting and straightforward fashion. She assigns blame equally, which was refreshing. Her life story was fascinating, about how a regular girl becomes a star without losing her way. Apparently the answer is decent parenting. Hmm, who knew?
   
   As for the diet stuff. Well, the story of her yo-yo weight was interesting, but when she started getting into the Jenny Craig stuff, she lost me. Jenny Craig put her on 1200 calories per day? Well, duh. Who wouldn't lose weight that way? Luckily, she does keep the shilling to a minimum.
   
   She did keep talking about how basically her son's fingers were grafted to the videogames, and the photos reveal he could use some 1200 calorie diets himself. But she didn't mention it, even when the photos made it glaringly obvious that she isn't the only one in the house with weight issues. Of course, she's a parent, loves him no matter what, blah, blah. And of course she does. But it was a huge elephant in the room that wasn't addressed and I just thought it was odd. And flame away, but the truth is the truth.
   
   All in all, a really good book. It kept me interested throughout.



2. I love Valerie Bertinelli and enjoyed reading her book. It is a very personable story and interesting to see that everyone has battles to deal with and how they do deal with them. Valerie truly inspires me.



3. This was a wonderful insight and written with quite a bit of humor. Very nice read. I read it in one day!



4. This is a great read, especially if you were a fan of Valerie from One Day at a Time.
   
   The book seems to fixate on Eddie Van Halen alot, which can be good or bad, depending if you're a fan or not.
   
   A good read.



5. This book touches many people in different ways, whether struggling with weight issues to just accepting changes in one's life. This book is great for anyone trying to deal with a change i their life. It is a quick read and it can inspire you to take your life back one pound at a time!

5 comments about sTORI Telling.

1. I enjoyed this book and read it in one sitting. I had seen the author on TV talking about her book and ordered it for that very reason. A great book for a 'quick read' as it's one you can read in a short amount of time.



2. An interesting look into a life we think we know alot about but we do not. Good read.



3. I have always been a big 90210 fan and couldn't wait to read about all the drama behind the scences. This book did not disapoint! It also gave me a new perspective on Tori Spelling's home life. Having parents with lots of money is not all it seems!



4. I just started reading her book today when I got it & I can just tell I'm gonna enjoy it,Tori is Not what the "Awful Media Lies Say"or shall I say SELL & I wonder how many ppl are hurting every day,all in the Name of GREED,it makes Me SICK!! It's gotten so I doubt most of what the News tries to tell/sell to me & I'll often go on-line and ck for myself seeing it seems that the Media must just not have enough time to ck there Facts,and there was a time when I though the News ppl had Ethics they had to follow,lying was a NO,NO but when I caught them in many a LIE I was appalled to find they Lost or Sold Out mabey to the Highest Bidder????
   It's kinda Sad that Tori had to write a Book to tell us her side but I'm glad she did,it just shows in her words what the Media took & Lied about.I wish Tori nothing short of Love & Hope the Very Best for her & her Growing Family......



5. I loved this book. Finished reading it in 1 day!! Non stop, can't put down interesting. I had no idea Tori Spelling was so funny and interesting. I really admire her and have come to love her in a whole new way.
   
   I have always had mixed feelings about Tori Spelling but have newfound respect and fondness for her.

4 comments about Vogue Living: Houses, Gardens, People.

1. you have to love decor and fashion to understand this book.it is Vogue after all!!!! the book is full of fabulous properties and fabulous people.I went through it already many times and got inspired by it.
   Buy it f you are a fan of vogue magazine !!!



2. There is no disputing that this is a sumptuous volume. Lavishly produced, its oversized 384 pages are crammed with images of exquisite rooms and lush gardens from 36 unique homes, owned by the rich and/or famous in Europe, America and North Africa and into the likes of which you and I will never set foot. (Which is the reason, thankfully, such books are produced and why we lesser mortals buy them.)
   
   There are rooms modern and rooms classic, arranged with the taste, elegance and restraint of the world's best decorators and captured by the world's greatest photographers. And yet the rooms are not museum pieces, but are demonstrably inhabited by their owners, their well-scrubbed children and their adorable dogs, such as the greyhound on page 317 filching a piece of cheese from the dinner table.
   
   My favourite room which is featured on the front jacket cover is of Janet de Botton's breakfast room in Provence, its French chateau décor a study in white, cream and faded pastel, the background, literally a wall of china - floral motifed white plates and platters displayed on white-painted, floor-to-ceiling wooden plate racks built into the walls. (Already I've been measuring my walls to see how I can incorporate something similar - though less vast - into my old house).
   
   At the opposite end of the décor spectrum is Amanda Brooks NYC loft, all kitsch and brash eye-popping colour like a Barbie Doll house with Brooks herself photographed in a Barbie Doll style gown in a Barbie Doll pose. (It's not to my personal taste but cleverly done & I had to look twice to be sure the figure lying stiffly across the bed wasn't a mannequin).
   
   If you are a fan of décor books you will find plenty more here to inspire, amuse and entertain you and your like-minded friends and family.
   
   So why did I hold back from a five star rating? My quibble is with the empty 14 pages devoted to Madonna which might have been put to better use: Madonna's cow pastures, M. with (admittedly cute) children; a gowned & high-heeled & coiffed M. feeding the chickens (as if!); M. canoodling with husband, a double-page shot of M's sheep -- & only one tiny interior shot, a sitting room that was rearranged by the photographer & does not reflect the actual décor of Madonna's house - which might have been of real interest even to a non-fan like me.
   Thus the book falls just a little short of being, for me, the epitome of the coffee-table décor genre.



3. Flash review: The perfect gift book for this season.
   
   This new book, timed for Xmas giving, features a selection of the best homes shown in Vogue in the past several years. It is a large-scale book, filled with wonderful color photography. Although Elle Decor and Architectural Digest have come out with similar books this season, neither can hold a candle to Vogue's tome. If you are familiar with the 1968 publication, "Vogue's Book of Houses, Gardens, People", which now sells for $400 and up if you can find it, you will know what is in store for you.
   
   Maximum emphasis on homes you would love to see in person, owned by people of impeccable style: Janet de Botton in the south of France, Marella Agnelli in Marrakech, David Cholmondeley's stately, etc.; minimal number of celebrity digs done by decorators of questionable taste which you tend to see in Architectural Digest. The style and taste of the featured houses, gardens (and, yes, people) are on an entirely different plane than those shown in the new books by the other two lifestyle magazines.



4. Photography is extraordinary. The people featured therein, not so much. Still, it's a beautifully done publication and worth the cash but buy it at discount.
   Stylemaven

No comments about Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door.

No comments about The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life.

5 comments about Gut Check: Confronting Love, Work, and Manhood in Your Twenties.

1. As an educated professional, and life long reader, I've had the opportunity to read many books. For the most part, you can separate literature into two categories, fiction and non-fiction; however, every once and a while I have the pleasure of reading a book that goes beyond the two dimensional pages that it is written on. This type of book surges with the unique literary power to reach into ones soul, challenging its reader to embark on a journey of spiritual change with the ultimate end being authentic happiness and eternal peace.
   
   This is a must read for any young man or woman, who has struggled with the questions: What is my ultimate purpose in life and what steps do I need to take in order to fulfill that purpose once it is realized?
   
   As a "successful," thirty-one year old, attorney I can honestly say this book has helped me to rethink my definition of success. Mr. Saab has thrown down the gauntlet for a new generation of young professionals challenging us to reorder our selfish desires by setting new life-goals centered not on ourselves but on that of the common good.
   
   This is by no means the stereotypical "self-help" manual. This book is a conversation with a young man that has seen and experienced the world's definition of the meaning of life and found it wanting.
   
   Regardless of your religious or moral predilections, this is a fun and lively read. In the words of the man that recommended this book to me "it is a real page turner."



2. Don't let the title of Gut Check: Confronting Love, Work, and Manhood in Your Twenties fool you into thinking that former reality television star Tarek Saab's debut book is only for men or twenty year olds. On the contrary, this 44-year-old wife and mom can't recommend Gut Check highly enough. I started off reading the book from the vantage point of a mother of two sons, hoping that my study of Tarek's journey to manhood might shed a glimmer of light on the precarious path of parenting two sons in today's world. But in the process, I found myself truly connecting with the book not only from that perspective, but also more completely as a spiritual seeker. Although Saab's book relates experiences during his formative post-college years, his concepts of seeking real truth in this life are relevant to anyone, at any age, who struggles to make the most of every moment of this time on earth as a voyage to our ultimate goal - eternal life with God.
   
   In today's society, we find ourselves surrounded by media-obsessed, instant gratification, celebrity driven lifestyles. Our children are growing up in a world where one's tally of unmet "friends" in a virtual world trumps real life relationships. We emulate the rich, the impossibly skinny, the overnight sensations - and these action messages trickle down to our kids and speak to them more effectually than the words we speak. So, in reading Gut Check I did learn a thing or two about the type of mom and role model I want to be for my sons. But more significantly, I learned about the importance of "focusing on death" to achieve a true measure of personal success in this life. This book reads almost like a novel, in "can't put it down" fashion, but also has a depth that will make you want to go back and truly study and meditate upon many passages. Tarek Saab's sharing of his own conversion journey has truly touched my life, which will in turn hopefully make me a better wife and mother.
   
   I'm pleased to give Gut Check by Tarek Saab my highest recommendation.



3. Gut Check: Confronting Love, Work, and Manhood in Your Twenties is a interesting new book by Tarek Saab. I only recently became aware of Mr. Saab as I heard him being interviewed on several Catholic podcasts and he presents an interesting story. One of his claims for fame is that he was a contestant on the reality show The Apprentice and he advanced fairly far before being fired by Donald Trump. I've never seen the show since so-called reality shows aren't my thing. But the book itself only talks very peripherally about his experience on the show and the book addresses much more serious topics.
   
   Tarek Saab is the son of a Lebanese father and American mother and grew up Catholic. The book mostly begins with his experiences in college and the story he tells will be familiar to many. His schooling becomes a time when faith is put on the back burner and partying and chasing after women becomes the number one priority. Though Tarek never quite loses his faith in school and would still attend Mass as more of a social thing than out of any love for the Mass. While going to school at times he evaluates his life and sees the wrong in it and then sets himself out on the right path only to stumble and fall back once again into familiar habits. Something else that many of us can relate to. He relates these periods of self-reflection and the pursuit of a belief in God.
   
   This book follows around the course of a conversion story, but it is not an overtly apologetic one of coming to fully believe in specific doctrines and making the case for them. His story is more of someone who never quite leaves faith out of his life, but at the same time never fully lets his faith enter into his whole life. He kept his faith in a sphere separate and groups of friends within each sphere. After college he enters a Fortune 500 company and is soon on the fast track in the corporate life.
   
   Reading through the book I was reminded of St. Augustine's "Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.", something that he also later goes on and quotes in the book. He writes in a forthright manner and is quite frank on his failings and the various episodes in his life before his fuller conversion. I found his spiritual biography to be quite insightful with many things to ponder. You could see the hound of Heaven following him and while at first he was not fully living a life as a Catholic, his Catholic faith was always there even if in a weakened state. This is a good reminder to those with children who have left the practice of the faith or have only made it a cultural expression. God is always pursuing is and there are those moments of grace when we slow down and actually let him catch us.
   
   I found this to be a quite enjoyable read and Tarek is a good writer who could write about himself without at the same time making the book all about himself and making his story relatable to others.



4. What Tarek Saab has done in this short, humorous, incisive book is offer persuasive measure to challenge most males to strip whatever vestiges left, be they big or small, of boyhood and embrace true manhood. Such an aim is ambitious and the author understands his limitations but he makes a brillaint start. Drawing on such great Catholic scholars and saints as Augustine, Francis De Sales, Chesterton and Fulton Sheen, Saab humbly makes the case, taking careful, subtle lessons through hard weathered personal experience and masculine grit. He comes off as neither heavy-handed nor shying away from tough matters. The pop culture (movies, rap, rock, etc.) mixed with the scriptural and theological is a potent apostolic combination and, as I told Saab in person at the 2008 Boston Catholic Men's Conference, his book may go down as one of the great spiritual works of the early 21st Century.
   This is a book for any man, or any men you might know, who need to "get their act together" spiritually or otherwise.



5. It is amazing to me that a book about getting closer to one's spirituality and understanding what it really is to be a man would find itself in the middle of what is clearly an orchestrated effort at a shill review campaign.
   
   Is it actually possible that 15 out of the first 16 reviews were all first-time reviewers who just happened to select this little book published by a niche publisher? And that each and every one of them without fail gave it five stars? And that each review conveiniently uses buzzwords from the book's own promotional materials?
   
   Does it make sense that many of the reviews were posted within hours of the book's release? What were there lines outside the B Dalton's at midnight, ala a Harry Potter novel? And that these first-time Amazon reviewers read it so voraciously that they didn't even have time to pee before rushing here to give it a wildly positive, perfect review?
   
   If this book is so perfect that 16 strangers would all find themselves in a near-stupor of compliments, wouldn't it seem that such a WONDERFUL book would at least have gotten some reviews or publicity?
   
   I applaud Tarek Saab's (or anyone's) personal exploration into manhood and spirituality, but one has to wonder if such subterfuge really brings one closer to God and self-awareness. At the very least I would hope Amazon's system would catch these blatant abuses of their rating and review systems.

5 comments about Bunny Tales.

1. Interesting if you have ever been to one of the Mansions Parties or if you ever watch "The girls next door" you gotta read this. Lets say "there is always two sides to a story"
   Nice book



2. I got this from a friend, and because it was free I didn't feel like I had to get my money's worth out of it. I enjoyed it a lot and found it a trashy, shocking at times, strange, and engaging book that blows apart the image Hef tries to create for himself.
   
   The grammatical errors were all over the place and that drove me nuts, but the actual content was fun. Yes, she divulges bedroom gossip - but it was about the least interesting part of the book. I enjoyed the parts about the dynamic between the gals and Hef much more.
   
   By the end I was pretty sick of all the drama and silliness. In many ways, Izabella is right that Hef wasn't very generous or understanding at times, but I think she misses the point that they had a business arrangement, not a relationship. She admits herself that she never had any alone time with Hef to really bond with him, so why is she surprised that when she has to leave, for whatever personal reason, she doesn't get an allowance? Her naiveté is surprising.
   
   Overall this is a fun book to read if you are curious about that lifestyle, but the writing and story aren't quite compelling enough to make it worth the cover price. I'd borrow it from the library.
   
   If you want to read a book about the sexy life, try Callgirl by Jeannette Angell. Written with much more style and savvy, Callgirl has a lot more in the way of juicy details about what that life is really like.



3. This woman tries to make herself sound good. She trashes all the other 'girlfriends' in the house while making herself sound educated, entitled and completely validated. She's not. She bashes Hugh Hefner and tries to make the pampered life of a 'girlfriend' sound tedious. She flaunts her law school education and tries to make light of the fact that she never passed her boards. She also tries to make it seem she wasn't basically a prostitute as a paid employee of Hef. I was bored and I ended up not liking her at all.



4. If you are looking for a book to divulge secrets about the Playboy Mansion and Hugh Hefner, this is not the book. It pretty much sums up exactly what you already know about the mansion. It jumps from topic to topic with no real outline. At one point she says she hates her life at the Mansion and the next minute she loves it. She makes it out like she is so much better than everyone else, yet she stays for the "free" ride. Also, there are numerous spelling and grammatical errors in the book. Very poorly edited. Total waste of money and time!



5. It was okay, but not written very well. The author's mind seemed all over the place. I kept wondering if anyone had actually read the book before publishing it. It just seemed like I was reading the first draft of someone's book.

5 comments about Trump: The Art of the Deal.

1. The Art of the deal is the only book written by Trump that I recommend; however, I rate this as one of the finest autobiographies I have read.
   
   The Art of the Deal takes you behind the scenes and into the thoughts of one of the great deal makers of our time. Donald jumps right in with a detailed daily account of his business dealings for an entire week offering a genuine feel for the life of high society and big-time business decisions. He goes on to discuss his childhood and the brilliance of his self made father whose millions enabled Donald to jump start his own career in Manhattan.
   
   Donald spends the bulk of his book discussing in detail his triumphs in Manhattan; from starting as unknown developer to gaining celebrity status as an entrepreneur. He outlines his often unpopular decisions such as filling half of one of his buildings with the homeless while waiting for tenants to give up their leases. He also outlines his knack for efficiency by taking over the construction of the Wollman Rink from the city and finishing the project in far less time and for reduced costs. Donald further discusses his entrance into the casino industry in New Jersey as well as his plans to build the world's tallest building on the west side and court NBC as its main tenant (something that obviously did not come to fruition). Perhaps this book is at its best in its discussion of Trump Tower, Donald's largest love and possibly most significant investment having been profitable even before completion of construction.
   
   Since the time when he finished the book, Donald's life has taken numerous turns many of which fall outside of real estate development. The Art of the Deal at its core is all about his real estate empire. Donald gives off none of the arrogance that he is often associated with, the only exception being in his aggressive approach to business. If you enjoy the real estate industry and want to hear from one of its great tycoons, The Art of the Deal is essential reading.



2. This is a excellent wealth of information and insight in Mr. Trump's life and business dealings of his early years. Learned he is a very good man. It is as intended very inspiring. Made me fill like I needed to go out and build sky scrapers as well, witch after reading this book now believe we all do in ways that fit each of us. Recomend reading his following book next Trump: The Art of the Comeback for more clairity.



3. Wow, The Donald has no real wig on this cover! Actually, this book is quite different from his later books. Here he gets into detail much more often and gives you better insight into the rise of his career (his fall and second rise came after this book).
   
   In this book you'll get the examples about Trump that made him rise. He was as bold then as he is now. Only difference was he had less money, but it'll make you realize that if you want to be succesful in the future you have to act succesful in the present.
   
   All the casino's and buildings he built early on in his career are mentioned in the book and the details about the deals are fun to read. Just consider this is a one-sided story, but the examples fit their goal.
   
   This book is like The Donald without a wig: strange, but fun to see.



4. Great book!!! I purchased this book because it was a best seller. Glad I did, it was before all the drama with his wives and near declaration of bankcruptcy. It explains his roots to his rise as one of the wealthiest land owners. Great read, hard to put down.



5. The fact that this book was written years ago makes it more valuable to someone who's looking for a good business book. Trump has developed his brand in an amazing way utilizing his abbility to relate to people. That way is making deals. Definetly a great book that teaches you one of the most important lessons to learn in business: how to make deals.

5 comments about Savage Grace: The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich and Famous American Family.

1. I first read this book when it originally came out. I was in high school and like many teenagers I was prepared to see parents as the source of most teenage troubles. After reading this book, I promptly wrote my parents a nice letter about what swell people they were. I was that grateful not to have had Brooks and Barbara Baekeland for parents.
   
   This is the rare book that proved even better than I remembered when I reread it last month. It starts with the murder of Barbara Baekeland by her son then goes back in time to beginnings of the Baekeland fortune through the passionate but ill-fated marriage of Brooks and Barbara until it catches up with the murder and the sad denouement of Tony's life. As one reviewer here has noted, this is not a traditional narrative but an oral history. The transcripts of interviews are presented without comment - very much like Jean Stein's great Edie and Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil - and the speakers reveal far more about themselves than any narrative could.
   
   If there is a villain in this story, for me it wasn't Tony Baekeland, who clearly suffered from serious mental illness but his father Brooks Baekeland. Rarely have I come across a character in fiction or nonfiction who made me want to slap him so hard or so often. Early on one former friend of the Baekelands' talks about wanting to kill Brooks in the street with a brick. By the end of the book you may, like me, find this to be a perfectly reasonable response because Brooks is a piece of work. In fact, he's a complete jerk. If I'd been Tony's lawyer I'd have used the fact that Tony had the opportunity to kill his father yet didn't as Exhibit A in the fact that Tony was insane. Whether he's yammering on about how much he was like his brilliant grandfather, complaining about the fact that Tony couldn't stick with anything (this from a writer who only managed to write one short story and didn't finish his PhD!) or basically abandoning Tony after he's released from Broadmoor, Brooks Baekeland is a loathsome individual. His blatant homophobia and sheer lack of compassion will take your breath away. Other characters come across as clueless or careless but Brooks is downright diabolical in his self-absorption.
   
   As an evocation of a time, a certain type of ultra-privileged couple (the sort with artistic pretensions but little talent or commitment) and a mind boggling selfishness, Savage Grace is a book to read and reread. It's suited for True Crime and biography fans. As noted, if you don't like oral histories you probably won't like it - there is very little narrative holding the interviews together. When the author wants to describe Riker's Island, she presents her description as an interview, for example. If you enjoy hearing the story from the mouths of those who lived it, Savage Grace is a book you won't soon forget.



2. Did not like the format of this book at all, would rather it had been
   all in present tense. Too much info of no use from people who did not matter. Also not enough family background.



3. An industrious European peasant immigrates to America at the end of the 19th century, invents plastic, becomes a gazillionaire and leaves his heirs a terrible lot of money. A couple of generations later, the fortune begets Brooks Baekeland, a wannabe-genius writer/adventurer/snob, who "marries down" when he makes middle-class Barbara Daly his wife. Barbara's extraordinary beauty is her ticket into the exclusive terrarium of the super-rich. She embraces social and talent-climbing like a religion and, together with Brooks, lives a loud, indulgent, hedonistic life without parameters. Their tempestuous marriage produces one child, Tony, who grows up to eclipse his father in terms of raw talent and then, later, to stab his mother to death with a kitchen knife in a London flat.
   
   Theme-wise, this book has everything - trashy money, smothering mothers, hyper-competitive fathers and sons, closeted homosexuality, sexual thrill-seeking, jet-setting, incest, murder and madness - it's Dominick Dunne meets Oresteia. It's the greatest book you'll ever take to the beach. It's the book that keeps you up all night. It's one of the most scandalous, salacious stories ever told - and it's all true. But the real accomplishment of the book is the format. In lieu of the straightforward black and white factual narration of most true crime books, Steven M. L. Aronson and Natalie Robins collected and artfully collated the remembered vignettes, fragmented glimpses, personal impressions, and eyewitness testimonies of family members, friends, acquaintances and survivors of the Baekeland's dark world. It's a looser but more compelling design that lets the colorful, lively voices of Baekeland contemporaries tell the story all the way to the terrifying, hair-raising, murderous destination. The denouement is at once shocking and perfectly ironic. Two decades after Savage Grace was first published, I am still turning friends on to it and still getting breathless, gushing phone calls about it. Can't wait for the movie.



4. Please don't waste your money buying this book, unless you appreciate authors who are too lazy to put a story together and instead rely on transcripts of the interviews with the people they interviewed to write the book. The actual "narrative" portion of the book is very sparse, and by about a third of a way through the book I found myself skipping huge sections of transcripts of interviews that were boring and uninteresting. It just seems to me that the writers gave up sifting through their research material in order to write their story, and, instead, just printed it verbatim as filler to make a "whole book". What a waste of time and my money. I don't even know if it deserves two stars! I suspect the other reviews were written by the publishers or people pushing the movie. Amazon recommended this book to me, but I will certainly not do the same for others.



5. The book is very interesting but kind of hard to follow. I don't like the format with all the interviews of different people. Most of the people in the book come across as snobbish and since I don't speak any other language except English, some of the words they use in another language I cannot pronounce and therefore don't know the meaning of, so I just had to guess at what they meant. Hard to follow but interesting in the relationships of these people. Definitely not one I can't put down!

5 comments about The Diana Chronicles.

1. This is a well written and compulsively readable book, which captures the essence of Diana better than any other biography I've read - and I've read many. Most books about Diana seem fall into one of two camps: either they are overly gushing and sympathetic (eg Andrew Morton, Paul Burrell) or they are critical in the extreme (eg Lady Colin Campbell, Patrick Jephson). Tina Brown is neither. She calls Diana out on her untruths (it's highly unlikely that Diana deliberately threw herself down the stairs) but also points out where her paranoia was justified (yes, the Squidgeygate tapes were deliberately released).
   
   There's not a lot of new material here (what was there left to find out?), but it's a very comprehensive look at Diana's life that pulls together all the various things that are known about her in such a way that you feel that you are viewing the truest and most complete picture yet. It also gave me a strong sense of what life behind the Palace walls is actually like and why Diana felt so isolated and uncomfortable there.
   
   Tina Brown is particularly good at getting inside Charles and Diana's heads: explaining Charles's misgivings at the time of the engagement or Diana's thoughts when she agreed to the divorce. At one point she refers to Diana being a tactician rather than a strategist (always going for the short term win rather than thinking of the long game), which I thought was a very astute observation. She discusses the Charles/Diana/Camilla triangle at great length, and ultimately concludes that quite possibly the marriage could have worked had Camilla not been ever-present (Camilla doesn't come across very well at all).
   
   This is a long book which starts a little slowly, but from the time that Diana meets Charles it races along. It's entertaining, it's insightful and it leaves you wistful for what could have been.



2. I loved this book because there was a lot to read, and it was all well-researched. I enjoyed it from start to finish. Diana got married when I was 5 years old, so I grew up reading about her. As a teenager, I devoured a lot of what was written about her. With these references floating around in my head, I was pleasantly surprised when I found the events I had read about in the papers described in greater detail, or when I read about events I didn't actually know about. Ms. Brown's accounts of a typical summer holiday at Balmoral were insightful and helped me to appreciate the lifestyle of the British Royal Family much better. When I watched The Queen, I noticed that much of the information in Ms. Brown's book was corroborated. I finished reading the book without taking sides. If anything came away with the impression that if Diana and her relatives were less arrogant, they would have been more compassionate or intervened more forcefully. Diana might have received counseling that would have saved her life. I can't quite understand why I was so taken with Diana as the mythological princess come to life. This incisive biography definitely broke the spell.



3. I bought the book as a gift.
   The person got really happy with the book.



4. The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown do not add much to our knowledge of the life and death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Nonetheless, Tina Brown's access to people and the 2007 publication date which allowed her to review all that was known before the inquest of that year and the next, does provide us with the most extensive compilation of quotations yet assembled in one place.
   
   While venturing to comment frequently on Diana's psychological state, Brown refers to but does not take into account her mother's alcoholism, the double-dealing of her sisters especially Jane Fellowes or similar bonding difficulties in Diana's life. Brown does, however, clearly emphasize the princess's astounding isolation in her early palace years.
   
   Brown also seems a bit bemused by the continual reports, from those who were present, of the healing touch the Princess seemed to have had, and of the gift of light Diana so willingly brought to so many. Brown does agree that Princess Diana always `rose to the occasion' and never disappointed those waiting for her, regardless of her personal state, even from the earliest days of her marriage.
   
   One of Brown's main contributions is the clear statement that El Fayed's ten-year shouting campaign about a murder conspiracy has almost obscured the fact that it was his son, his hotel and his staff that in the end were responsible for the death of the Princess of Wales.
   
   The other point Brown makes is that, on the evidence, Diana and Charles liked each other, cared for one another and that without Camilla might have made a go of their reationship. Thus Brown hints at but again does not develop the story of Camilla's tenacity. Perhaps especially because of Charles' inability to resist Camilla, it seems impossible for Brown to paint a picture of Charles as someone fit to be king and defender of (the) faith, at least according to the standards set by his mother and grandfather. Brown reluctantly, and almost in spite of herself, reveals Charles' failure to be courteous to the young woman he was escorting as she struggled to cope with their early engagements.
   
   Roy Strong, the fastidious director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, met the couple at the unveiling of an exhibition at his museum and told Brown « I don't think he - Charles - looked after her enough. » Patsy and David Puttnam, a film producer, were present at a dinner in 1984 at the London home of Lord Waldegrave and his wife Caroline. While Diana was being `watched' and reported on to the palace, Brown tells us that « In fact, it was Charles' bad behaviour, not Diana's, that made an impression on the Puttnams that night. While Diana was solicitous and affectionate towards the Prince, he was openly dismissive towards her. `He behaved as if she were an irritant,' said Patsy. `He would have liked her to be invisible and she knew it.' »
   
   Brown is, overall, another Charles apologist, but then Diana is dead, Charles is alive and likely will be king and Brown is still a working girl in need of the next good job. Still, on two key issues of interest - was it Diana or Camilla who rendez-vous'd with Charles in the train before the marriage, and is it Charles or Hewitt who fathered Prince Harry - Brown only repeats already aired information and gossip, without even trying to put the pieces together in ways that might suggest new readings.
   
   In places the book seems poorly edited or awkwardly written, trying to `bridge the pond' in a way that sometimes leaves it stranded in the mid-Atlantic. Nevertheless, if you are a gossip hound who loves to know what key players in any drama `really said' this book will probably be of interest. If you have not read the « Diana literature » as it has emerged, this book offers a very good summary overview.



5. This book was a little too long, and could have dispensed with some of the endless trivia about England's nobility. But the saga of Princess Di is otherwise written in an entertaining style, and I believe the subject herself would have approved. The book shows just how stultifying royal life really is, and how difficult it was for a young woman to adjust to what she thought she wanted. It also gives me some qualms at the thought that Charles might someday become king. From what Tina Brown writes, he doesn't seem like the kind of person who should be given any real power...luckily, the monarchy doesn't have much!