Description:
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
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