The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor
Author: Penny Junor
The House of Windsor is a big business, though one with more ups and downs than the stock market. Prince Philip calls it “The Firm,” and all the royal executives and their powerful associates are supposed to make every effort to avoid even a hint of scandal that could diminish the reputation of the family business.
Unfortunately for the royals, for the past twenty years scandal and controversy have deluged the Queen’s family, putting everything at risk. Focusing primarily on the years after the death of Diana and leading up to the heir to the throne’s marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles this past April 9th, royal insider Penny Junor offers a sympathetic yet utterly candid look at a family that has made itself the world’s soap opera in THE FIRM: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor.
Can “The Firm” survive much longer? Will Charles or even William decide that the throne is not worth the trouble? Can this, the ultimate family business, weather this storm of spiritual (though not fiscal) bankruptcy, or will momentum and a cadre of brilliant advisors keep the enterprise in business for years to come?
THE FIRM investigates the Family’s relationship with government, the press and the people. It looks at whether the institution can reach out to those, particularly the young, who see the House of Windsor as insignificant. It asks, in short, whether the British monarchy has a future.
Penny Junor knows the answers in this sure-to-be controversial book—the first to be published on the newly restructured royal family.
Library Journal
Readers of this interesting and occasionally jaw-dropping look at the world's most famous dysfunctional family will find plenty to engage them. Journalist and royal biographer Junor (Charles: Victim or Villain; Diana, Princess of Wales) tells the reader that "the Queen believes that with few exceptions everything that has gone wrong for the monarchy in the last twenty years has been attributable to Mrs. Parker Bowles." And the reason Prince Harry wore a Nazi uniform to a costume party? "Today's young are blissfully unaware of history (some of them aren't even taught it in our schools)." The reader comes away from the book feeling that had this family ever actually sat down and talked to one another a lot of their very public misfortunes might have been avoided. However, Junor doesn't just dish the dirt. She goes to a great deal of trouble to explain how "The Firm" works (and the queen, Princes Philip and Charles, and Princess Anne work very hard indeed) and at what actual cost to the nation. Given the Royal Family's frequent appearance in the headlines, this work is sure to be in demand. Highly recommended for all public libraries.-Elizabeth Mellett, Brookline P.L., MA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Books about: Geschäftsethik, ein Unterrichten und das Lernen der Klassenzimmer-Ausgabe: Konzepte und Fälle
American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood
Author: Marie Arana
In her father’s Peruvian family, Marie Arana was taught to be a proper lady, yet in her mother’s American family she learned to shoot a gun, break a horse, and snap a chicken’s neck for dinner. Arana shuttled easily between these deeply separate cultures for years. But only when she immigrated with her family to the United States did she come to understand that she was a hybrid American whose cultural identity was split in half. Coming to terms with this split is at the heart of this graceful, beautifully realized portrait of a child who “was a north-south collision, a New World fusion. An American Chica.”
Here are two vastly different landscapes: Peru—earthquake-prone, charged with ghosts of history and mythology—and the sprawling prairie lands of Wyoming. In these rich terrains resides a colorful cast of family members who bring Arana’s historia to life...her proud grandfather who one day simply stopped coming down the stairs; her dazzling grandmother, “clicking through the house as if she were making her way onstage.” But most important are Arana’s parents: he a brilliant engineer, she a gifted musician. For more than half a century these two passionate, strong-willed people struggled to overcome the bicultural tensions in their marriage and, finally, to prevail.
New York Times Book Review - Wendy Gimbel
[In] Arana's passionate account of her childhood, cross-fertilization is a source of strength . . . One of the many reasons the reader can't put this memoir down is the author's impressive command of her craft.
Washington Post
American Chica is a fascinating blend of autobiography and soap opera, memoir and meditation. ... full of larger-than-life characters and stranger-than-fiction situations. ... delightful.
USA Today
Lush, mystical ... a memoir that blends family historia and the puzzling deadly politics of Peru.
New York Times Book Review
Part history, part family memoir ... American Chica reads like a collaboration between John Cheever and Isabel Allende.... One of the many reasons the reader can't put this memoir down is the author's impressive command of her craft.... Arana has left her own imprint on her material, while at the same time displaying virtuosity in the storyteller's traditional gifts: spareness, clarity, and a passion for allegory.
Publishers Weekly
Though this memoir of growing up in America and Peru centers on Arana's parents' turbulent marriage, her real focus is the way cultures define, limit and enrich us. At one point, Arana, whose mother is American and father is Peruvian, recalls her first lesson in the color politics of Latin America. She was living in a gated house, in a factory town high in the Andes, and wanted to invite the daughter of the family cook to her birthday party. Of course she can come, said Arana's mother, but if she does, none of the mothers of the other little girls will allow them to attend; an Indian girl is not accepted at a party of aristocratic schoolchildren. "I am reminded of my political innocence," Arana writes, "when I go to Latino conferences in [the U.S.]. When I see the children of Spanish-blooded oligarchs line up alongside migrant workers for a piece of affirmative action." It is this willingness to slice through convenient classifications, to see the rifts in every group, that distinguishes Arana's account of how she learned to navigate between a culture that encouraged family loyalty and another that fostered independence. She writes beautifully, whether describing hunting for ghosts in Peru's highlands, chewing tobacco in Wyoming, attending an American school in Lima or finding friends in New Jersey. Arana, the editor of the Washington Post Book World, blends a journalist's dedication to research with a style that sings with humor. Her memoir is an outstanding contribution to the growing shelf of Latina literature. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Those who have lived life trying to bridge two different worlds will find that Arana's intimate and intelligent memoir captures exactly the pulse of a changing America. In the mid-1940s, Arana's Peruvian father, an upper-class, MIT-educated engineer, married a free-spirited Wyoming musician and brought her back to his homeland to raise their three children. Told from the perspective of a precocious young Arana, who is learning that she has to navigate constantly between her inner two selves the "wild American" and the "lady-like Latina" the first chapters recount an idyllic childhood in Peru. But eventually, circumstance leads her to trace her lineage back to the infamous Julio Cesar Arana, who turned a profitable rubber business at the edge of the Amazon into a virtual human slaughterhouse, and Arana reveals the legacy of shame surrounding her surname. Arana expertly juggles the good vs. evil elements essential to any coming-of-age story and forays effortlessly into mystical moments. Toward the end, her themes begin to feel repetitive, but her story still manages to grip you. Finally able to connect the pieces of her family's history, she likens Peru's earthquakes to her parents' love, in which "two force fields meet and you have confrontation." With her first book, Arana, who is editor of the Washington Post Book World, clearly demonstrates her ability to write crystalline prose and make erudite cultural observations. Recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/01.] Adriana Lopez, "Cr ticas" Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Arana, editor of the Washington Post Book World, recently described this memoir as a love story. It is fraught with the tension of two worlds colliding: her North American mother's independent, free-spirited individualism crashes into her South American father's traditional, family-based orientation. Their children formed the bicultural bridge between them. In rich, lyrical prose, the author details her privileged, Peruvian childhood, watched by amas, and schooled at home. She writes of her grandfather who lived like a hermit in his own house, and further back the ancestors who played a horrifying role on Peru's rubber plantations. She describes the scent of sugar, "raw, rough, Cartavio brown" from her father's factory; the sounds of "El Gringo," the crazy blind man on his daily rounds; and the surreal world of los pishtacos, the ghosts, so mystifying, but terrifyingly real to Arana. She also writes of her mother and her former marriages, and finally of her life in America. Here Arana is an American Chica, where she leads not a double life, sometimes in her "American skin" at other times she is a Latina, but a triple life in which she makes up a "whole new person." While this book, filled with humor and insight, will be of special interest to Hispanic teens, it is a sparkling addition to the story of America's "salad bowl" and will appeal to young people of all heritages.-Jane S. Drabkin, Chinn Park Regional Library, Prince William, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Expressive memoirs of a Peruvian-American girlhood, by the editor of the Washington Post Book World. Arana, daughter of a Peruvian father and an American mother, sees herself as a hybrid, a fusion of Latina and Anglo, embodying both cultures but an outsider in each. Growing up in Cartavio, a W.R. Grace company town on the coast of Peru (where her father was an engineer) in the 1950s, the author was surrounded by native servants who filled the observant and impressionable child with magical legends and tales of fearsome spirits. At the same time, she was being schooled at home by her no-nonsense mother with textbooks ordered from the US. In 1956, when her American grandmother was dying, the family spent three months in Wyoming. There Arana, not yet seven, met her all-American relatives, learned to shoot, chew tobacco, and spit, and encountered racial segregation for the first time. Back in Peru (this time in Lima) and once again a member of the upper class, she fooled the administrator of the American school there into assigning her to the Spanish-speaking classes (where she made fun of the Anglos), but out of school she played American street games with her older brother. In 1959, the family moved to New Jersey, and the author describes herself slipping in and out of her cultural identities there, choosing when to be Peruvian and when to be American. Within this winning portrait of a bicultural childhood are a host of notable characters-the mysterious Peruvian grandfather who stayed in his upstairs room for 20 years, the tradition-bound Peruvian grandmother who ruled the family, the young gardener who taught Arana about her soul, and (most of all) her parents, whose difficult but enduring marriage is at the very center of her story. A rich and compelling personal narrative.
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