Dianaworld: An Obsession by Edward White
The 1990s was the decade of tabloid queens, blonde and doomed, despised and beloved in equal measure. To wait in line at the grocery store was to be besieged with a chronicle of the tragedies, disasters, scandals, and dietary minutiae of these women’s lives, dissected for public consumption alongside the impulse-purchase bait of Twix bars and Mentos. Among the reigning superstars of the tabloid universe, Diana Spencer, better known as Princess Di, was true royalty. Even before her death in 1997, in the car accident that resulted when her driver lost control while speeding in flight from the paparazzi who hounded her everywhere, Diana was the stuff of legend, a global cultural phenomenon. But since nothing elevates a woman’s status quite like a sudden, sensational, untimely demise, with her death, the cult of Princess Di mounted to unprecedented levels of rabid devotion. As the “People’s Princess,” Diana has been exalted as a friend to the common man and a champion of human rights, as blessed mother, fashion icon, protectress of the vulnerable, a troubled soul and camp idol. Her followers have even rallied for the ill-fated Princess’s canonization to sainthood. It is this mutability, as biographer Edward White writes in Dianaworld, that makes Diana’s celebrity so singular. Both in life and in her long afterlife, she has been everything to everyone, the landing site for an enormous multiplicity of cultural meanings, fantasies, conspiracy theories, and fascinations. White’s book is not a traditional biography, its aim not to dredge the “Real Diana” up and out from the welter of diverse – and often contradictory – roles she has played in the public imagination. Instead, Dianaworld is a panoramic guide to Diana Mania itself––easily the single leading cause of anglophilia since the Beatles.
For those intrigued by the cult of (female) celebrity, the Royal Family, ‘90s nostalgia, and the tribulations of modern-day sainthood.
Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth by Karen Lloyd
The Mole People is a 1956 sci-fi horror film about the discovery of a society of albino Sumerians, the last survivors of an apocalyptic Mesopotamian flood, who have been living underground for millennia. To harvest the mushrooms that provide the core of their necessarily limited subterranean diet, the albino elite maintains a population of hunchbacked, goggle-eyed humanoid mutants in chattel slavery. Though the enslaved mutants are called “mole people,” they do not look particularly like moles; apart from their unwieldy clawed paw-hands, they have a far more reptilian mien. It is with mixed feelings that I must report that Intraterrestrials in no way concerns mole people coerced to pluck fungi within the chasms of a hollow earth. Author Karen Lloyd is a biologist – a microbial biogeochemist, to be exact – and so her focus is on less fictional, but no less alien, subsurface denizens. Deep beneath the soil, at the bottom of the ocean, inside Andean volcanoes, and encased within the arctic ice reside a plethora of single-celled microorganisms, many of whom have only recently been identified. These creatures are hardcore extremists: some live in boiling water, others in pure acid, others still in bleach. They can live for thousands of years without seeming alive at all. And as Lloyd effuses in her infectiously enthusiastic prose, these tiny creatures have much to teach us about the nature of life, from how it came into being here on earth, to how it might develop on other planets. Although Intraterrestrials reads like an adventurer’s travelogue, following Lloyd from one far-flung realm to the next as she quests after her microbial quarry, for all the excitement, the book compromises none of its scientific seriousness. You’ll be so enthralled, you won’t even miss the mole people.
For fans of weird nature, microbes, high-octane popular science, Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey, and not-so-hollow earth theories.
