This is a beautiful book. It begins with a brief (and fairly shallow) biography. The majority of the book features over 180 photographs from Grace Kelly's life, from infancy through to her funeral, in both colour and black and white, interspersed with quotations by or about Grace. The reproduction and layout of the photographs and the quality of the paper stock are both high and the result is a lovely coffee table book. Most of the photos are stunning and many are ones that I have not seen before.
Having said that, my impression was that the book had been compiled hastily and without care. Some quibbles:
- Some dates are incorrect. For example there is a photograph of
Princess Grace meeting John F Kennedy dated May 24, 1964 - which seems unlikely given that it was 6 months after his assassination! Elsewhere there are two photographs of the same event (Grace's arrival in Monaco for her wedding) one of which is dated April 12 1956 and the other April 14 1956.
- The photographs are not always displayed in chronological order. For example, midway through a number of photos from the height of her film career in the mid-fifties comes a shot of Her Serene Highness attending a party in 1977. I found this annoying and detrimental to the idea that we were following the span of her life - especially as the majority ARE chronologically arranged.
- While most of the photos are gorgeous, some appeared to have been chosen simply because they were previously unseen rather than because of any photographic merit - photographs that were out of focus or badly composed. Others were colour photographs reproduced in black and white, probably to sit better alongside other black and white images, but I would have preferred to see them as originally taken.
This is still a lovely book and would be a great gift for a Grace Kelly fan. It is just a shame that more care was not put into its compilation and it is for this reason that I give it only 3 stars.
(Incidentally, I recently flipped through the smaller format of this book in Borders. It appears that at least some of the errors have been corrected for the smaller edition).