Rating: 
Summary: Simply compelling
Review: A tantalizing trip through castle Windsor. Listening to Ms. Kelley narrate her book is a real treat. The amount of delicious gossip and factual information keeps one riveted to their headphones. Ms. Kelley delivers each tidbit with conviction and a hint of humor. While some information may be disputed one cannot help but wonder at the outlandish behavior of this blue blood family and how it tries to deal with its problems. Still, it was interesting to know that even the royals are to an extent as common as everyone else and that the highs and lows of life spare no one regardless of birth or position in society. Highly recommended for a fast listen if you can find a copy somewhere. The book contains four cassettes which are rather short in length. I got through the entire book in just one and a half days.
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Gossipy, and sometimes unbelievable!
Review: Kitty Kelley's books are pretty much all the same--gossipy, tabloid-style writing--but they are fun to read. Some of the theories that she puts across in the book are so outlandish that you wonder if you're not *really* reading one of the tabloids! If you like reading about the Royal Family, and aren't too serious, you'll probably enjoy it. As for the authenticity of what she writes...well, I'll leave that for you to decide!
Rating: 
Summary: Nice trash and not much reality
Review: Thanks Kitty :
Without you we would not be able to get trash books on the shelves.
I really can't wait for your other fiction book on the Bush family.
From what I heard you are really telling the whole truth there. Uhhh!
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: Enjoyable trash
Review: This book starts out as a sort of 'Hollywood Babylon' of the Royal Family, with some of the grubbier details of their pre-war family life being revealed. For example, she claims that the Queen Mother was artificially inseminated, and that Prince Philip - or Phil the Greek, to his loyal subjects - ran a string of mistresses. It's all highly entertaining, and very revealing of the selfish, narcissistic mindset of the Royals - even if a few of the details are a bit shaky, the way they act seems to ring true. It's no surprise that they took out a court order to stop this book being published in the UK.
Unfortunately the second half of the book is taken over by the twin marital disasters of Princesses Diana and Sarah Ferguson, and rather declines into recycled tabloid stories and below-stairs gossip. Still, it is nice to see these collcted into one sort-of coherent narrative.
It is a pity that Kelley doesn't seem interested in delving into the stories a bit more deeply. For instance, we are told that a gentleman with a radio scanner just happened to chance upon, and record, intimate conversations between Princess Diana and one of her paramours - is this really credible, or were her telephone conversations being monitored (probably either by the police Special Branch or MI5) as she claimed? Don't forget the same thing happened to Prince Charles - UK citizens will remember the Squidgygate tapes with affection! Random chance, or something more sinister?
It's also a pity that she doesn't deal with Prince Edward having to resign from the Royal Marines after a few weeks, or his less than glorious career with Andrew Lloyd Webber's production company - now we'll never know if he progressed beyond being the office tea-boy! I suppose, though, that the American audience this book is primarily aimed at wouldn't have been very interested in this relatively minor Royal.
All in all, this is a long way from being a serious history of the Royal Family. That doesn't mean it's a bad book, however. While undeniably trashy, it's just the thing if you fancy a good dose of schadenfreude, or an insight into the decline of the public's esteem and respect for the Windsors.
For those UK readers who don't have access to the US edition through a helpful friend or relative, try eBay or ABEbooks. eBay worked for me...
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