The Lives of Danielle Steel: The Unauthorized Biography of America's #1 Best-Selling Author

This is a great book. Danielle Steel is not just some rich arthur in her mansion in San Francisco. She is a compasionate person who actually feels and gets involved with the less fortunate. I didn't feel that this book was slanted either way. I think it is a fair portrait of one's life. Definitely an intestersting read.

I have to say it: I am not a Danielle Steel fan in the strict sense of the word. I find her prose repetitive, her dénouements fairly sugarcoated and her writing rather low-brow in general, especially for a writer who scoffs at the romance writer definition and would like to be compared with Judith Krantz or Sidney Sheldon. And yet, there is something about her books that keeps me coming back for more. I especially enjoy her period works, like "Vanished," "Zoya," or "Crossings" and I have to say she has a knack at making a good portrayal of the times in which her books are set. The plots are intricate enough and one can almost invariably bond and relate to her characters without difficulty. As to this unauthorized biography, "The Lives of Danielle Steel," it has helped me understand more about the persona who is behind the fiction. The research on the author's life is very thorough and it also makes some good points about her fiction. This book doesn't intend to tarnish Danielle Steel's image, all the opposite: it helps her fans discover her as a human being. It's true that it gouges up a lot of rubbish about her past but in the end it was she who took the decision to marry ex-cons and drug-addicts. We all make mistakes and have to live them down as best we can. I found the book as entertaining as any of Steel's books and, as I have already said, it helped me relate better to Danielle Steel now that I know that she's human.

All of these negative reviewers are missing the point. This book was written to show the interesting parallels between Danielle Steels life and the characters in her book. The book doesn't go out of its way to say that Danielle is a bad person - it's just saying, "look, her books are a lot like her life." You people should just relax and enjoy the parallels between life and fiction. This is a great book, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I'm also a Danielle Steel fan - I've read all of her books - and I now look back at them with a different eye, which is fun!