Powells reprints a review from New Republic Online that has only good things to say about Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles. This long-awaited book on the late Princess of Wales is arguably THE biography of the summer. Tina Brown, known for her journalistic years at The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, approaches the story as more than just the story of one young woman. She's looking at the bigger picture. And as such, Diana's tale is a big one.
How often does summer reading disappoint? Usually you are immune to the shill of the bestseller list, but now it's hot and you deserve some fun, too. And so you shell out the thirty bucks for what the bookstores are hawking on their buzzy front tables -- but then the thriller peters out into preposterousness, and you become guiltily bored with the book on Iraq, and you bog down in the Big Novel's glut of detail. So it is all the more delicious to report that The Diana Chronicles is that contradiction in terms: a summer spellbinder for serious people. Its pleasures are owed to more than its sensational subject. (Sensation is its subject.) They come also from seeing a fine mind take a severely limited theme and create out of it an acutely observed portrait of manners and mores, love and folly.
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