Book Review: The Spare by Prince Harry

I picked up the book Spare, by Prince Harry with ambivalent feelings toward him.  I simply wanted to read the book that everyone was talking about.  The book begins not at his birth, but at his mother's death.  A symbolic nod, I am sure to the fact that the life he had lived the first twelve years of his life was over and this was his new life.  However, I could only view starting the book at that point as a desperate plea to garner sympathy from his readers by riding on the coattails of his much revered mother.  This was brought clear by a grown man referring to his mother as mummy the whole way through the book.  Again, I saw this as an effort to gain sympathy from the reader.  Honestly, it made me roll my eyes every time I had to read the word mummy.   The bulk of this book is a diatribe against not only the paparazzi but the news outlets that encourage their behavior.   As the book progresses the animosity toward his family began to grow due to their perceived lack of support against the paparrazi but also their complicity in supposedly feeding negative news about Harry to the press. Seriously, it was like a broken record and half way through the book, I just wanted it to be over. 

  Chapter after chapter, he bemoans his horrible life and lack of familial support, even as he jets off to spend a few weeks with his friends in Africa amongst other equally privileged places and activities.  The book walks the reader through his courtship and marriage and the eventual departure from the royal family responsibilities with the same continual 'poor me' mentality.  The only nod to his privilege came when he was buying his first house in the States.    He wrote about scraping the money together for a down payment for the house that he and his wife purchased.  Of course, he mentioned that it was without touching any of mummy's money.   It felt fake to me, almost as if it was put into the book as an effort to show that he is like the rest of us.  Think again, the down payment that he would have needed for the house they bought would have been more than the cost of an average house.  More privilege.

While the book Spare did a great job with showing the common person how difficult it is to live in the public eye, I felt that it also showed how out of touch with the real world he really is.  He grew up with privileges that the most of us can only dream of yet all he could focus on, was the negative.  I picked up on no sense of understanding that the opportunities he has in his life are due to his family.   There was no thankfulness in this book, only hatred. He has a family.  Every family has problems, but there was no grace toward them, and he totally threw that family under the bus in his misguided attempt to gain sympathy from the reader.  The book left a bad taste in my mouth.   From the constant negativity to the lack of thankfulness it was all a bad taste.   Furthermore, the press that he hates so much and that ruined his entire life?  For a man that supposedly hates it, writing this book was just a way of running headlong toward it.    In reading, my ambivalent feelings toward Prince Harry actually changed.  What little respect I did have for him, has disappeared.

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