Customer Reviews

Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief

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Any fan of Diana's will know why we mourned (and still mourn) her passing. This book however is fascinating for it's analysis of those mourners who said things like "I never knew how much Diana meant to me until she died" and "I cried more at her death than at my own father's". Why did Diana's death have such an enormous impact on a global scale, even for people who claimed not to have liked her during her lifetime? It was more than just pity at the way a young life had been taken too soon. This book is an excellent examination of the huge significance of the gobal mourning and grief that was displayed in 1997.

Any fan of Diana's will know why we mourned (and still mourn) her passing. This book however is fascinating for it's analysis of those mourners who said things like "I never knew how much Diana meant to me until she died" and "I cried more at her death than at my own father's". Why did Diana's death have such an enormous impact on a global scale, even for people who claimed not to have liked her during her lifetime? It was more than just pity at the way a young life had been taken too soon. This book is an excellent examination of the huge significance of the gobal mourning and grief that was displayed in 1997.

Any fan of Diana's will know why they mourned her passing. This book however is fascinating for it's analysis of those mourners who said things like "I never knew how much Diana meant to me until she died" and "I cried more at her death than at my own father's". Why did Diana's death have such an enormous impact on a global scale, even for people who claimed not to have liked her during her lifetime? It was more than just pity at the way a young life had been taken too soon. This book is an excellent examination of the huge significance of the gobal mourning and grief that was displayed in 1997.

I was surprised and annoyed reading this book. It was a dissection of socialogical perversity. The analysis was past ridiculous. I kept checking the title to make sure it was a book about Diana. This was a series of sociology 101 term papers. I did not find it interesting or even feasible to examine Diana through the microscope of gender identification, sexuality, homosexuality, culturism - pro or con. Was the author so desperate to find a unique way to examine this icon? Oh yeah, there were a few chapters defining what an icon is, I suppose so we might understand why Diana was so everpresent in the world stage. This book was painful to read, not because it examined the loss of such a high profile figure, but because it was worse than the driest text book I ever had to read in college. I think the various contributors got extra pages for the number of words that had more than 10 characters. I was a sociology major in college and this book would have changed my mind about my choice. If you want to read disassociated, microscopic dissertations that had to be more of an intellectual joke than worthwhile, valuable reading material. Let me simplify this wannabe thesis on the mourning of Diana, she was a charasmatic, warm, complex human being. Don't waste your time or your money unless you want something to substitute for a sleeping pill. There were more footnotes than substance.
Entertainment value = ZERO.