Diana: The Last Year - Softcover

Spoto, Donald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0609803883 ISBN 13: 9780609803882

Publisher: Three Rivers Press, 1998

Synopsis

Critically acclaimed, best-selling biographer Donald Spoto recounts all the pain, promise, and joy of the last year in the tragically short life of Diana, Princess of Wales.

For those of us who loved and admired her, Diana's final year was in many ways the most fascinating and insightful of her life. It was a turbulent, 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 Diana: The Last Year, Donald Spoto allows us to finally understand the complete story of this woman in conflict. Diana was driven by a philanthropic desire to relieve suffering and change the world, but she was also determined to make up for a youth that was taken from her, at the age of nineteen, when she became the wife of the future king of England. In Donald Spoto's elegant and richly satisfying book, Diana's last year is set before us in all of its triumph and glory.

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: Three Rivers Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0609803883
• ISBN 13: 9780609803882
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 220