Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Whatever your reasons for buying this book - whether it be mere curiosity about palace gossip or partaking in the frenzy around the fastest-selling nonfiction book of all time - you will get more out of it if you approach it with an open heart and mind. This well-written account of one of the most famous people in the world, ghostwritten by J.R. Moehringer, has a loose three-part structure: Harry’s early life (including the death of his mother), his 20s, and finally his life with Meghan. Moehringer is an expert storyteller, bringing to vivid life Harry’s thoughts, experiences and points of view. By the end of the book, you get a full understanding of not only why he chose to take a step back from royal life, but also why he chose to publish this for the world to read. Beyond the headlines and the tidbits about the book, it is an extremely sad tale. In some sense, Harry is lucky to have been born in modern times - royal families always suffered feuds and trysts, and in other times someone might have simply offed his head. Still, Harry has had a uniquely privileged - and uniquely terrible - life. Any child is much better off with a poor, loving set of parents than being wealthy and famous but losing your mother in the way Harry did. All of us of a certain age clearly remember Princess Diana’s death as one of the iconic moments of modern history, and seeing her children walk behind her coffin with millions of people viewing, couldn’t help but think, ‘Gosh, what could these children be thinking?’. Well, Harry tells us exactly what he thought at this moment, and thus brings private and public history together for the first time. He describes the incredible pain and isolation he felt, and how his lack of being able to remember her reduced his mother to nothing but a hole in his heart. It is easy to set up the book as a Harry & Meghan versus the Royal Family kind of tale, but the book is much more complicated than that. It raises serious questions about some of the most important issues we are grappling with, on a global scale: social media and its ill effects, the price of fame, and the tension between old traditions and modern times. For British audiences in particular, it raises - briefly - the question of what role the monarchy should continue to play in modern life, although Harry wisely says he cannot answer it himself. Harry was born to be a follower - he was never meant to rule, but at some point in his life he wanted to think for himself, and was not going to neatly fall in line with the institution that raised him, and take the abuses and slights - small and big - that he suffered. Instead, he chose to get up and leave for Los Angeles - the place where a man can remake himself anew and where there are so many other celebrities so it is easier to ‘blend in’. He is not the first royal to leave, but he is the first one to be able to tell us about the deal with the devil that Queen Elizabeth II made a long time ago with the press, and the personal costs it has exacted on his family, in a truthful and straightforward manner. I’m sure Queen Elizabeth did not intend for things to end this way. No grandmother wants to see her family split apart. But the way the palace - and by extension, his brother, father, and yes, Queen Elizabeth - treated Harry, is unforgivable. Harry and Meghan were dying by way of a thousand cuts via the work of palace courtiers, who maintained their job security by setting the royal family offices against each other via the press. But make no mistake, the royal family let them do that. It is not that Harry is against his father and brother. It is that he is so deeply disappointed with them, their lack of character, integrity, and true concern for the person who is supposed to be closest to them. So should we. When Harry decided to publish this memoir it was fairly clear to him that he was probably never going to mend the relationship with his family, and that those bridges were already burnt. So he went ahead and published a book, because nobody ever prepared him for a day job and now he has a mortgage to pay. But he also wrote the book because, I think, he really did need to tell his story, and it was important for him. Of course, there is another side to every story. But I tend to believe Harry more than I believe anyone else. With that said, haven’t we all had a lifetime’s worth of palace intrigue to indulge in? I hope Meghan and Harry, and all of us, can now move on.