Rating: 
Summary: A positive review
Review: Having read this book I feel that it has been unfairly maligned. It is neither a trashing of the individuals in the house of Windsor nor is it a tabloid-esque scandal sheet. Ms. Kelly paints a complex psychological portrait of the members of the royal family in a way that does not excuse their well documented ill-behavior but rather allows the reader to have insight into their personal motivations. In a way the royal family of Britain are painted as very real and human characters with flaws and many emotional injuries. I wonder if the negative reaction to this book is due to the timing of its release and the fact that the narrative humanizes characters that Britain, for the sake of its history and system of governance, needs to be more that human. And for the rest of the world to serve as a mirror for our fantasies. For me this book elicited pathos for this family--the queen's coldness and inhumanity caused by the early death of her father and the trauma of the second world war with all of the incipient pressures that would befall her. (what a potentially terrifying childhood knowing that your destiny may require you to "save the nation" though the strength of your character). As for Charles (for whom I personally had a storng antipathy towards prior to reading this book) the childhood he had left him quite incapable of being a loving sympathetic man despite the fact that he apparently has a tremendous need to be so. Diana was bound to be crushed by the institution of royalty and the monarchy. Her "loony' behavior makes perfect sense when you consider that she as a 19 year old girl had just steeped though the looking glass and into a world with no allies. Also, don't kid yourself, while there some epistemological problems and some quotes must clearly be fabricated, a technique of historians going back to Herodotous, this is an exceedingly well crafted book.
Rating: 
Summary: AN UNBELIEVABLE NUMBER OF FACTUAL ERRORS
Review: Every book must be judged on its own terms. Having just read Ms. Kelley's book, I accept it for what the author obviously intended it to be - tabloid gossip (which has its place in our society) wrapped it the aura of solid historical research. The book succeeds well as an exhaustive collection of passed down whispers and carefully extracted negative opinions and mean-spirited, flip comments from dozens of interview subjects. However, it fails very seriously as any kind of reliable or astute presentation of historical facts - let alone a fair or reliable interpretation of these events. It's rather distressing to read so many comments here on Amazon from people who think they have received an education in historical fact from Ms. Kelley's book. My name is Michael John Sullivan and I am a scholar of royal history. My latest book, "A FATAL PASSION - The Story of the Uncrowned Last Empress of Russia", covers much the same territory as Kelley's. But it doesn't take a specialist to find the many factual errors Kelley has made. A trip to the history department of any local community college could have set matters correct on a number of issues. It's really astonishing that with all the resourses Ms. Kelley had at her disposal and all the assistance and money she received that a simple check of facts could not have been conducted. To detail everything incorrect would take far too much space here, but let's just take the first page of her beginning chapter (2) after the introduction - and the very first point that she attempts to make in the book. Kelley writes on page 5 that until l9l7 "many English kings never spoke the King's English. They spoke only German . . . This is utterly absurd! George I spoke German when the House of Hanover was imported to England at the beginning of the l8th Century, but his son learned English, and his grandson George III by the time of the American Revolution was a thorough Englishman. The monarchs of England may have kept marrying German spouses, but the children were brought up intensely British and spoke English as their first and foremost tongue. George IV was as English as Nigel Bruce, and Queen Victoria was obviously not a German-speaking monarch, nor her son, the very British Edward VII. How on earth Kelley can begin her book with such a ludicrous and false premise is beyond credibility. She obviously wants to impress the importance of the changing of the Royal Family's name from a German one in l9l7 to a created English one - but in so doing she totally fabricates and distorts and starts the reader off with a completely false sense of English Royal history. Her tendency to dispense with facts continues throughout the book as gossip is championed at the expense of simple, logical explanation - should the proper facts not be ignored. Dates, names, and relationships time and again are incorrectly stated. What a shame. When a small press tightly budgets a minor book, such oversights can be explained away. But what is the excuse of a multi-million dollar project such as this that had everyone from the CEO of Time-Warner on down being credited by Kelley in her introduction as having been deeply involved. History can be both fascinating AND correct, and it was sad that Kelley couldn't achieve both.
Rating:
Summary: Reads like a tabloid
Review: Kitty Kelley would make a great gossip columnist, but as a biographer or historian she is absolutely awful. She seems unaware that when King Georg IV and his wife Elizabeth visited North America World War II had not yet started. She also seems confused about when Churchill became Prime Minister. If she fails with these basic facts that can be found in any history book, how reliable can the rest of her information be?
Rating: 
Summary: Curse this book!
Review: I picked the darn thing up at 8 PM one night and couldn't put it down until 7AM the following morning! It "reads like a tabloid"---well, D'UH! If you're looking for a serious, scholarly study on the House of Windsor, pass this little baby up. If you're looking for the dirt, the grim, the whispered secrets, and gossip galore, this book is for you. (Dormouse's word of advice: Just don't read it the night before a job interview...not good, not good at all.)
Rating: 
Summary: Less dissertation than regurgitation
Review: What is it about this book of Kitty Kelley's that does not ring true? It is not just that, having been released in 1997, it is dated. No one could have foretold the then-imminent death of Diana, and some of the book's predictions are admirably prescient, if not original. (One example: the outpouring of nostalgic affection that would arise upon the death of the Queen Mother.) The book is at worst, readable, and at best, informative. But it is extravagantly overblown. A minimalist Kelley is not. One reason her book is short on credibility is because it lacks a consistent voice. Any biography must draw on a variety of sources, but the reader gets the feeling that not only is this not Kitty Kelley speaking, it is not even Kitty Kelley paraphrasing. There are long passages, not in quotation marks, that appear to be either lifted holus bolus from another (British) source or crudely edited, possibly by a British assistant. Kelley is an American, but she could have pulled this off if she had maintained a genuinely American point of view: after all, Americans seem to be the target audience for her book. As well, while her book contains a vast scattershot of information, she does not connect the dots. Her bibliography is lengthy but her chapter notes are brief and vague. Even if much of the book is true, it is hard to lend it serious credence due to some obvious anachronistic errors. She berates the Queen Mother, at the time Queen Consort to King George VI, for the vast wardrobe for her visit to Canada and the United States in the summer of 1939. She implies that despite their claims of acceding to hardship and wartime deprivation, the monarchs travelled in extravagant style with no concern for the strict limits of spending coupons that were the lot of ordinary Britons. Yet the royal couple toured in the summer of 1939; however much they spent, the King and Queen's trip was completed in advance of World War II with its subsequent rationing. (War was declared by England on September 3rd, after Germany invaded Poland.) This type of error should be dealt with in Biography 101 and failing that, picked up by a moderately astute copy editor. Later Kelley comments on how the Princess of Wales, estranged from her husband, made herself out to be all alone one Christmas when in fact she had a mother, a brother, and twin sisters to call upon. Diana's sisters, Sarah and Jane, are not twins and nowhere else in the book is this implied. Was it a simple typo of "two" that the spell-check picked up and suggested "twin"? Regardless, the error should have been corrected in proofreading. These lapses are puzzling, even in the most informal of narratives. Moreover, the statement about the Princess's family resources belies Kelley's constant earlier allusions to the dysfunction already rampant in the Spencer clan. The wicked vignettes peppered throughout the book make compelling reading, but they should be taken with several grains of salt.
Rating:
Summary: Can't put it down!
Review: This book is very readable. If you are interested in the little nasty goings-on 'behind-the-scenes,' then this is your book. Personally, I am an Anglophile and am one of those Yanks who go ga-ga over royalty (especially British Royalty). Ms. Kelley does her best to tarnish my vision of them - but then she polishes it a bit - then tarnishes some more. Great fun really. She actually takes you on a roller coaster ride as your feelings about the Windsors go up and down and over and out. But then...what family doesn't have its up and downs - its bad apples? Don't we all have moments when we're less than kind to people? Fortunately, no one is looking over our shoulder writing down every little faux pas. Ms. Kelley makes the Royals human - which is a blast! I love it when the Queen uses four-letter words. You don't want to miss the joke Kitty tells about the Queen in her Rolls with her lady-in-waiting regarding Princess Margaret (may she rest in peace). I was in hysterics! A 'jolly good' book!
Rating:
Summary: Royal Delight
Review: As a (non-anglophile) Canadian who spent summers growing up in England, I really appreciated this sinfully delicious recount of the royal family. My Quebec-born father always abhorred seeing these people depicted on our currency, stamps and even a portrait displayed in a hockey arena and always had some sarcastic comment about them. I wish he was alive to give this a read. This book is packed with the most humourous tidbits that actually make the royals look human. The story about the Duke of Edenburgh smacking the secret service agent with a newspaper during a motorcade and the joke about the Queen, Princess Margaret, the hijackers and the Rolls Royce made me roar with raucious laughter, as did the joke about the cinematographer on page 304. I only wish it had 1000 pages so I could savour it longer. This is the best book I have read since Elroy's American Tabloid! I enthusiastically recommend it! Heidi Howell
Rating:
Summary: I'm a baaaaaaaad boy
Review: Hey Liz, if you're reading this - I've read this! I wasn't stopped by customs, struck down by lightning, or anything. I know your secrets, Liz - and it has reinforced my determination to make the UK surrender to MY benelovent dictatorship. Nothing can stop me now!
Rating:
Summary: Not a real bio, but still worth it
Review: There are only a few things to say about this book, and they are that this is definitely not a real biography, but mostly sprinkled with gossip and tabloid-ish 'facts'. However, even though there's barely any real history, it's still a good read, and easy to get engrossed in.
Rating:
Summary: Kitty Kelley's worst
Review: Kelley, at her best (The Nancy Reagan bio), can write a good overview of a celebrity and make a convincing case for her final assessment of an individual. In this book, she utterly failed. After years spent on the project, Kelley was unable to present any new information. What she has done is rehash every tabloid story and cut and paste it all together. This reads like a quilt badly sewn together. Yes, the Royals are probably ignorant, uneducated, immoral, boring dolts. We have all heard all of these stories before. I got the impression that even Kelley became bored of her subject but had a contract to fulfill. This time, however, she aimed too high. Without anyone significant willing to speak to her (we are talking about a politically important institution here, not some hollywood celebrity), without any new revelations, this is little more than a collection of gossip with little insight. Buy it only for that cruise you are taking. It is light, mindless, and it won't make much of a difference if you never finish it.
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