Diana (Large Print Home Library Edition) - Easy-to-Read Hardcover Book for Seniors & Visually Impaired Readers - Perfect for Cozy Reading Nooks & Book Club Discussions

One can read this book for a number of different reasons. First, it provides a glimpse inside the lives of Britain's landed aristocracy that most readers will never experience. Downtown Abbey may be a better choice if that is the main appeal because one would have to read through hundreds of pages of facts about Diana to capture this slice of the life of Britain's most fortunate.One could also read this book to get the definitive account of who, to put it bluntly, Diana slept with. The author does cut through a lot of the rumors to give a fact based account but somehow reading the book for that is to miss the whole point of Diana's all too brief life.What comes through powerfully in these pages is that Diana lived a life, from the age of six on, of incredible personal suffering. She then used that personal experience to connect to people who were also deeply wounded. By doing so she literally changed world history. Before Diana AIDS was a scary disease, possibly God's punishment for the sin of homosexuality. By shaking the hand of a man dying from AIDS she began the transformation of public perception of the disease from something scary to a health care crisis that needed to be dealt with.She also transformed the perspective of what is to be expected of the royal family. People now demand their princes and princesses not to be remote demigods but people actually interested in the problems of everyday citizens.Modern people do not necessarily want doctrines or policies to solve their life but they do want to feel like the most privileged care and empathize with them. This is what all the scandalmongers about Diana fail to see.Diana was not a role model in the full sense of the term. She believed in silly things like astrological forecasts and psychics and could be dishonest and arrogant in her private life. But none of these "revelations" matter because people adored Diana because they believed, rightly, that she cared about people who were suffering. The only kind of revelation that could ruin her reputation is if it was discovered that she privately made fun of the many victims she visited. Such a revelation would be so completely contradictory to everything said about her, even by her enemies, that it would almost certainly be false.Diana made bad decisions, could make people recognize how her royalty elevated her above them and believed in ridiculous things like astrology but somehow managed to live one of the most important lives of the 20th century because, instead of wallowing in pain, she used intense personal suffering as a means of empathizing with the unfortunate and forgotten.Surely, this should be the primary focus of those of us who will never experience her privileged life rather than obsessing over a detailed history of her failings, both personal and public. I personally believe that as time passes, and those Diana personally hurt fade from the public scene, her importance as a world figure will only increase and her peccadillos will be more and more simply forgotten.