REVIEWS
From The New York Times Book Review:
With "The Diana Chronicles," Tina Brown breathes new life into the
saga of this royal "icon of blondness" by astutely revealing just
how powerful, and how marketable, her story became in the age of
modern celebrity journalism....Brown offers an insightful,
absorbing account of the pas de deux into which, to her eventual
peril, Diana joined with the paparazzi. As the former editor of
Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, Brown certainly has the authority
to examine the Princess of Wales as a creation and a
casualty of the media glare.
-Caroline Weber
From The New Yorker:
By now, there have been dozens of books....But the best
book on Diana is the newest, "The Diana Chronicles"... by Tina
Brown....her book is, among other things, a miracle of
access....She tells the story fluently, with engrossing detail on
every page, and the mastery of tone which made her Tatler
famous for being popular with the people it was laughing at.
-John Lanchester
From The Chicago Tribune:
...[An] insanely readable and improbably profound new
biography...."The Diana Chronicles," Brown''s hotly awaited dish on
the princess, [is] more than a mere gossip-fest....real charm and
substance lie in Brown''s analysis of contemporary media....It is
terrifically well written, with motion-capture phrases that
instantly distill some complicated essence of contemporary life
into a few deft adjectives.
-Julia Keller
From The Boston Globe:
"The Diana Chronicles," by Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity
Fair and The New Yorker, peels many layers of...
mystery away and even makes the old horror stories of [Diana''s]
life seem fresh....Brown gives them new vigor, with insights based
on her own exhaustive research and a wickedly canny,
celebrity-trained eye for detail.
-Amy Graves
From The Washington Post:
...Brown''s jam-packed, juicy roll in the high cotton is...
fragrant with the rich schadenfreude that makes Top People so much
easier to bear. And in return for its rumored $2 million advance,
it includes shovelfuls of hot fresh dirt, tucked among the standard
(and amazingly detailed) iconic fare. Remember the sex-soaked phone
tapes (Diana as Squidgy, or Charles''s Tampax fantasy)? Remember
the Royal Love Train? Dueling media manipulation? Jealous
attention-grabbing? Top-of-the-line adultery, divorce and
money-grubbing?...The sour wisdom Brown gleaned during decades
spent editing chic magazines glints throughout her book, like
rhinestones under sackcloth....Diana''s tragicomedy is
Shakespearean in scale, with its slippery royal machinations, its
agonized ironies, its seething jealousies and heartbreaking
inevitability....a walloping good read.
-Diana McLellan
From The Wall Street Journal:
Only Ms. Brown could deploy such words as "hottie" and
"propinquity" in the same sentence. In her hands, a trashy (if
delicious) tale is rendered vividly mordant. She writes with the
feline flair of a woman who has met, but not necessarily liked,
most of the characters in her book and who has an uncommonly good
way with characterization....The book''s greatest attraction,
however, is its sheer wealth of detail, by turns salacious,
vinegary, depressing and hilarious....a psychodrama, a morality
play, a pageant of recklessness and revenge, of passion and pity,
of loneliness and looniness.
-Tunku Varadarajan
From The LA Times:
I read every whiplash chapter and came away rubbing my cervical
vertebrae...."The Diana Chronicles," Brown''s account of the young
aristocrat''s marriage to the heir to the throne, motherhood,
divorce and death, has enough of Diana''s hairpin personality
turns, emotional drops and gleeful summits to be a Disneyland
thrill ride....Brown reminds us of her instantly intimate, magical
presence.
-Patt Morrison
MORE PRAISE FOR THE DIANA CHRONICLES:
"Nothing comes close to Tina Brown''s book for its tight grip on
the dark human comedy that was Diana''s life and death. Brown knows
the ritual dances, the shouts and whispers of the tribes of Britain
better than anyone who has ever written this story but she also has
a perfect ear for the way ordinary people responded to the doomed
Princess. The result is a compulsively page-turning trip to the
poisoned place where class met glamour and the result was
catastrophe."
-Simon Schama, author of A History of
Britain
"This is not only first-rate biography, but a marvelous social
history, and a bitingly accurate portrait of the English upper
classes."
-Michael Korda, author of Charmed Lives and
Ike
"Tina Brown has produced something that is, as well as absorbing
and stirring, witty and penetrating."
-Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not
Great
"A delightfully smart and insightful book that... weaves a
compelling human drama into a rich social history."
-Walter Isaacson, author of Einstein: His Life and
Universe