my book report

Prepared for miss. Molly

Prepared by: Ismaeel Ibrahim AL Hammadi

ID: H00084204

Title: Princess Diana

Author: Cherry Gilchrist

Publisher: Penguin Reader (1998)

Setting: Place London, time 1961-1997

Character: Princess Diana

Pages: (40)

Level: (3)

20th April 2008










INTRODUCTION

This is my semester 2 English book report about Princess Diana which is by the author Cherry Gilchrist. My report has three main parts: author, a background to the book, a summary of the story and a conclusion.



AUTHOR

Cherry Gilchrist was born in 1949 and now lives in Bristol, England. She is an expert on social history and has written educational books on English life in the First World War and in the 1930s. She has also written original stories for children and is well known for retelling traditional stories and legends. The Streets of London is another title in the Penguin Readers series which Cherry has written. When she is not writing, Cherry loves to travel: she has a home in Russia and she has visited many parts of Asia and the Middle East. Her husband is a financial writer and she has two grown-up children.




BACKGROUND

During the 1980s and 1990s, Diana, Princess of Wales was one of the world’s most glamorous and famous figures. Her photograph was printed on thousands of magazine covers and pictures of her could be seen on countless television programmers. Millions of people around the world knew of Diana, but few people actually knew the real person behind the media image. It is this real person rather than the public persona that Cherry Gilchrist examines. In Princess Diana she pulls aside the curtains of royal mystery and mystique surrounding Diana and looks at the inner person, her feelings, attitudes and anxieties. She shows how Diana’s background and upbringing influenced her and how her personality was formed from the many painful experiences she had to endure as the child of a broken marriage. The effect of childhood experience on the adult is an important feature of the text.

SUMMARY OF THE STORY

Princess Diana is the biography of Diana, Princess of Wales, who died at theageof36in1997.The author, Cherry Gilchrist, describes Diana’s background and childhood and the events that led up to her marriage to the Prince of Wales in July 1981. She examines the 15 years of Diana’s marriage - the birth of her two sons, her illnesses, and her work for charities - and the growing problems in her relationship with Prince Charles that led to divorce in 1996. The book explains how the ‘fairy-tale romance’ went wrong and how Diana eventually freed herself from the royal family and started to lead an independent life. In the final chapter the author relates the tumultuous events of 1997, Diana’s new romance with Dodi Fayed, her shocking death in a car accident and the royal funeral that was watched by millions of television viewers around the world. We learn of the contribution that Diana made to Britain and the world and the lessons which her life can teach us all.





CONCLUSION (opinion)

I thought the book was excellent for a lot of reasons. First, the story and Diana were interesting. I liked Diana because she was very kind and nice to everyone. My favorite chapter is when she was sick but she tried to hide her sickness. It took me about two day to read this book. The book was the right level, not to hard or not too easy. Also, I learned some new words.





Glossary

It will be useful to know the following words.

Appearance (n) if you make an appearance somewhere it means that you go there and can be seen by others
Charity (n) money or presents that are given to people who need help

Fairy-tale (n) a story for children in which unreal things happen

Funeral (n) a meeting at church for somebody who has died

Future (adj) happening in the time after now

Hug (v) to put your arms around someone in a friendly way and hold them

Popular (adj) liked by a lot of people

Public (n) all the ordinary people in a place

Public (adj) there for anyone to use

Recording (n) words or music that is put onto a machine

Royal (adj) belonging to a king or queen

Separated (adj) not living with your husband/wife any more






WEBSITE

http://www.penguinreaders.com

http://plrcatalogue.pearson.com/Samples/9781405882019_FS_12_07.pdf


SOURCES

Princess Diana, the (ISBN 0 – 582 – 41685 – X)