Diana: The Last Year - Hardcover

Spoto, Donald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0517288885 ISBN 13: 9780517288887

Publisher: Random House Value Publishing, 1998

Synopsis

For Diana, her final year was in many ways the most fascinating and insightful of her life. It was a turbulent, often amazing period in which she formally severed her marriage ties to the heir to the British throne, fell passionately in love with Dodi al-Fayed, and truly began to come into her own after years of personal adversity.

In the first hours and days after the news of Diana's death in Paris shocked the world, major media outlets from CNN to NBC turned to Donald Spoto for help in articulating the meaning of the tragedy and understanding its effect on the British monarchy, the worldwide public who admired and loved her, and, most important, her own family.

In Diana: The Last Year, Spoto tells for the first time the complete story of a woman in conflict. Diana was driven by a philanthropic desire to relieve suffering and change the world for the better. But she was also determined to make up for a youth that was taken from her, at the age of nineteen, when she entered the restrictive and, from her perspective, decidedly chilly House of Windsor. Like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, Diana in her last year was re-creating her public and private self.

About this title

Review

Donald Spoto is a career biographer who's received critical accolades for his works on Tennessee Williams, Laurence Olivier, and Alfred Hitchcock, among others. All the stranger, then, to find him the author of Diana: The Last Year, written as a postscript to his The Decline and Fall of the House of Windsor, which he was working on at the time of Diana's death. Even readers who are comfortable with the princess's unofficial canonization may be taken aback by Spoto's book, which gilds England's Rose several layers thick in adulation and makes liberal use of quotations from the likes of Virgil, Swift, and Thomas More. Granted, the final year of Diana's life was one marked by an exhaustive schedule of appearances and speeches on behalf of charities and charitable causes (AIDS, the homeless, and a move to ban land mines, to name but a few), but seldom will you see the supposed impassivity of a noted biographer so completely abandoned in a book that features a soaring paean on its subject on nearly every page.

When he's not praising Diana, Spoto spends his time cataloging the cold, irrelevant, and spiteful character of the royal family, which is supposed to act as the necessary darkness to all of Diana's saintly light. At least they're given something approaching human attributes, unlike the elevated, but decidedly unrecognizable, subject of this book. --John Longenbaugh

From the Back Cover

"Spoto is neither hack biographer nor vicious exposé artist. He is instead a good example of the biographer as advocate-a historian who believes in the intrinsic decency of his subject and explains human foibles with respect and sensitivity."        
San Francisco Chronicle

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Value Publishing
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0517288885
• ISBN 13: 9780517288887
• Binding: Hardcover