Catherine Whitney has written or collaborated on more than twenty-five books, including Framing a Life: A Family Memoir with Geraldine Ferraro and Guilty: The Collapse of Criminal Justice with the late Judge Harold J. Rothwax.
Whitney's treatment of "the women of Windsor" (the queen mother, the queen, Princess Margaret, and Princess Anne) opens, oddly enough, with a prolog not about any of them but instead criticizing the late Princess of Wales ("Drama Queen") and Prince Charles ("the queen's biggest headache"). Whitney (The Calling: A Year in the Life of an Order of Nuns) then goes over familiar ground in this superficial work-the abdication of Edward VIII, the marriage of Elizabeth and Philip, Princess Margaret's affair with Peter Townsend, the attempted kidnapping of Princess Anne, etc., unable to go into any depth owing to the amount of ground she must cover in well under 300 pages. Those who have read even one good biography of either the queen mother or the queen will find nothing new here, and those who have somehow managed to escape all knowledge of the Royal Family and now feel a need to address their ignorance would do better with Ben Pimlott's The Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth II or Anne Edwards's Royal Sisters: Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret. Recommended only for libraries that feel they must own everything about the British Royal Family.-Liz Mellett, P.L. of Brookline, MA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
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