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.
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