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Prince Harry’s Open Book

With its relentless candor, spare reveals more than its author may have intended..

After watching two Oprah specials, reading various profiles, listening to assorted podcasts, and streaming a six-hour Netflix confessional, I did not expect Prince Harry’s tell-all memoir to tell me anything its author hadn’t many times before. It’s true that Harry’s familiar grievances — the myriad intrusions of the tabloid press, the royal family’s willful indifference to racist attacks on its first biracial member, and the unending beef over a child’s wedding attire — all get space in Spare , but there is so much more. Thanks to a leak , anyone with an internet connection now knows that Harry once suffered frostnip on his “todger” (which is circumcised) and that William, allegedly a Suits superfan, once threw him on a dog bowl during an argument. They may have learned how Harry lost his virginity and how many people he killed in Afghanistan. Still, none of these salacious details prepared me for the experience of reading the book. Or, in my case, listening to the audiobook: nearly 16 hours of Harry’s animated delivery, at once sympathetic, angry, exasperating, funny, and persistently self-justifying. Spare is a mess of contradictions, but as an insight into the royal reality, it is as singular as it is strange.

Opening with the memory of a meeting with his father and brother after Prince Philip’s funeral, Spare quickly spells out at least one of Harry’s motives for all this talking: He wants to explain, to his family and presumably the world, exactly why he stepped back from senior duties in early 2020. Over more than 400 pages, he describes how the British press drove him out while the palace did nothing to help. You’ve heard this before but not with the unvarnished fury he lets rip here. The editor who, he says, invented the 2002 report about his weed smoking? “An infected pustule on the arse of humanity, plus a shit excuse for a journalist.” Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the newspaper that ran it? “Just to the right of the Taliban” in terms of his politics. “The paps had always been grotesque people, but as I reached maturity they were worse,” he — or, more exactly, ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer, who has been called a “ skeleton exhumer ” and has rendered Harry’s incandescent rage with scalding clarity — writes. “They were more emboldened, more radicalized, just as young men in Iraq had been radicalized. Their mullahs were editors, the same ones who’d vowed to do better after Mummy died.”

The death of his mother, Princess Diana, is the tragedy that frames Harry’s life. His memory of his father, King Charles III, breaking the news was the first of a handful of Diana-related episodes that made me tear up. Even though he witnessed her burial, Harry says he remained unable to accept her death until he was 23 — nearly ten years in which he sustained the sincere conviction that she had gone into hiding to escape the press and would send for him any day now. When reality sets in, he’s already settled on his villain: the British tabloids. He recalls how the paparazzi followed him everywhere, stalking him and splashing his worst moments across front pages. They hacked his phone, tracked his loved ones, and apparently destroyed every romantic relationship he had before Meghan Markle. It takes a toll on his family life too: Harry repeatedly accuses certain family members of trading damaging stories about him, the disposable spare to his brother’s heir, to tabloid journalists in order to improve their own image. After serving in the army, he develops agoraphobia, panic attacks, and an acute sense of loneliness seemingly fueled by a distrust of those closest to him. As his brother and friends are getting married and having kids, he is still drying the TK Maxx (it’s “TK” in Britain) clothes his bodyguards helped him pick out on a radiator, eating takeout alone over his father’s sink.

So you feel for him even as you’re exasperated by him because, for all his claims to the moral high ground, Spare ’s Harry keeps score, and he is petty. Once again, he’s litigating an exhaustive list of tabloid headlines written about him or Meghan and wondering how things might have turned out differently if the palace had issued a statement saying it actually allowed Meghan to wear ripped jeans to some event. He gets granular in his grievances, offering up an anecdote about his sister-in-law’s reluctance to share lip gloss with his wife as if it were a character statement. Where Harry’s pettiness really shines is in the classic older-sibling-younger-sibling stuff. In Harry’s telling, the future king is envious of his little brother’s relative freedom and purpose. He is always yelling at Harry: to shave his wedding beard because he, Prince William, isn’t allowed to wear one; to let him “have” Africa because rhinos and elephants are his thing. According to Harry, it’s William who drove the heir-versus-spare competition, but the sense of rivalry seems to run both ways. Consider this extended aside about William’s waning hotness: “I looked at Willy, really looked at him, maybe for the first time since we were boys. I took it all in: his familiar scowl, which had always been his default in dealings with me; his alarming baldness, more advanced than my own; his famous resemblance to Mummy, which was fading with time. With age.”

In a recent interview with Anderson Cooper, Harry refuted the idea that this passage, with all its digs at William’s physical appearance, was “cutting at all,” which, come on. But when he is challenged, Harry often counters with Actually I never said that — another example of the press twisting my words . Over the weekend, when ITV’s Tom Bradby began to ask him about the allegations of racism Harry and Meghan made in their Oprah interview, Harry cut him off. “No, I didn’t,” he said, refusing to concede Bradby’s point that a member of the royal family raising concerns about baby Archie’s skin color might be understood as “essentially racist” and instead launching into a convoluted explanation of unconscious bias. (Interestingly, there is no mention of the incident in the book). After years of tabloid lies, of course Harry would be sensitive to inaccurate reporting. But he comes across as so defensive that it’s hard not to agree with Charles when he urges Harry, “My darling boy, just don’t read it.” (Unfortunately, if this week’s interview with Stephen Colbert is any indication, Harry still hasn’t entirely embraced that advice.)

Throughout Harry and Meghan’s post-royal productions, their lack of self-awareness can make even their legitimate complaints seem grating. Spare is no different. In an effort to (maybe?) underscore his relatability, Harry recalls footmen bringing him and William their dinner under silver domes — but even though it “sounds posh,” the food was just fish fingers. He complains of life in a cage even as he jets all over the world at his leisure: back and forth to Botswana, to the North Pole and the South Pole, to a luxury suite in Las Vegas with the lads and a multiday party at Courtney Cox’s house. He worries about his dad cutting him off in his mid-30s, and while he acknowledges the absurdity of that predicament, he also balks at dipping into the substantial inheritance left to him by his mother. As royal residences go, his bachelor pad in Kensington Palace may have been less than regal, but it is still a free apartment in one of London’s most expensive neighborhoods. And then there is the fundamental paradox of his choosing to sell and resell his story in the first place. Harry may welcome the opportunity to tell all, in his own words, rather than having to rely on unnamed sources as a cipher. At the same time, he is making a lucrative business of doing so. He is rumored to have received a $20 million advance for Spare , which is currently breaking sales records . Of that, he has given just under $2 million to charity.

And yet, in spite of his blind spots, he is so candid about so much, and that makes Spare an incomparably bonkers read. Here is a prince in my ear, telling me about the shopping bag full of weed he smoked and peeing his pants on a sailboat and applying Elizabeth Arden face cream to his penis. He is telling me about the effect of magnesium on his bowels and how, when he was tripping, the moon seemed to prophesize Meghan’s entrance into his life. He is doing it all without a discernible sense of ego, as if I had asked and as if these were normal biographical details to share. Countless movies, TV shows, and books have attempted to reconstruct the grinding interior of this family’s existence, but none of them has approached the sheer wackiness of this inside account. Royal life looks worse, but also so much weirder, than we could have known.

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Prince Harry’s Spare is a sad and self-indicting portrait of royalty on the brink

The press is the villain but there are no heroes in Prince Harry’s new memoir.

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Spare , the explosive new memoir from Prince Harry, is a conflicted book. It feels like a diatribe from someone who has only recently learned that it is physically possible to talk openly about his life and his anger, and who now has no idea how to modulate himself. The result is occasionally insufferable, but also oddly fascinating. At times you wonder if it should ever have been made public.

By turns artless and lyrical, affectionate and bitter, Spare ’s 400 pages read in a chaotic swirl. It spirals from the death of Harry’s mother Princess Diana in 1997, across his stunted and laddish adolescence, through his manly army days and his marriage to Meghan Markle, and up to the point that he decided to step down as a senior member of the British royal family in 2020.

Throughout, Harry’s ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer channels Harry’s voice with disarming candor. Intimate details of royal life stream out unceasingly: the brown peat-sweetened water in the baths at Balmoral, the petty squabbles over parking spots at Kensington Palace, the miserly Windsor Christmas traditions. (Princess Margaret, upon gifting Harry a cheap ballpoint pen, points out that it has a tiny rubber fish wrapped around it. “Wow,” says Harry.)

Moehringer, who won a Pulitzer under his own name for his 2000 Los Angeles Times article “ Crossing Over ” and ghostwrote Andre Agassi’s celebrated memoir Open , presents Harry to the reader as a likably jockish sort, straightforward and uninterested in literary flourishes. His sentences are simple and sparse, often broken into single words. Harry (via Moehringer) introduces a Faulkner reference by noting that he found it on brainyquote.com, and he is charmingly overwhelmed by Meghan’s literary sophistication when she references Eat Pray Love , a book Harry informs us he has never heard of.

More Harry’s speed, it seems, are stories about how he lost his virginity (an older woman behind a pub) and how his penis was frostbitten during a trek to the North Pole (“Now my South Pole is on the fritz”). These he presents to the reader with a sort of dirty wink, an establishing of his credentials as a lad’s lad who would certainly never want to get in the way of anyone’s good time.

And yet even Harry, the subtext goes, can see that there is something badly wrong with the relationship between the British monarchy and the British press — especially when it comes to the way the British press treated Meghan, the British monarchy’s first member of color. So what’s everyone else’s excuse?

What, especially, is the excuse of Harry’s father and brother, King Charles and Prince William, that fraught, fragile family unit left behind after Diana’s death? They are the people to whom Harry was at one point closest in the world, and from whom he is now estranged. His relationships with them, and with his lost mother, are the beating heart of Spare .

Harry writes with palpable tenderness about Charles and William, whom he calls Pa and Willy. (In turn, Charles calls Harry “darling boy,” and William calls Harry “Harold.”) Charles appears during Harry’s childhood as an absentmindedly sweet man who leaves notes on Harry’s pillow about how proud he is of him. Every morning, Charles does headstands in his underwear for physical therapy, and he is attached to his childhood teddy bear, which he totes around everywhere. Meanwhile, William, the only person who truly understands the trauma of Diana’s death and of growing up in the glare of paparazzi flashbulbs, is in the first section of the book a partner in crime, a comrade, the first person Harry turns to with problems large and small: both when one of Diana’s old friends writes a tell-all, and when one of Harry’s school friends convinces him to shave off all his hair.

Yet Charles and William are both, in Harry’s telling, corrupted by the force of the crown, which pushes them to prioritize their own reputations and consider Harry’s expendable. Heirs, always, over spares.

“I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy,” he writes bluntly. “I was summoned to provide backup, distraction, diversion and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow.” In real life, William seems to be in little need of organ donations, but both he and Charles could always use something to take the pressure of the press’s attention off of them. Harry provides a handy distraction.

To that end, Charles allows his office to form an alliance with a journalist who falsely reports that a teenage Harry has gone to rehab for his cocaine use. Rather than denouncing the story, they use it to make Charles look sympathetic as the harried single father to a teen addict. (Harry darkly sees the hand of Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles’s longtime mistress and now queen consort, at work here, as the source for the piece is a known Camilla ally.)

The pattern continues for decades, with Charles and Camilla continually prioritizing their own rehabilitation narrative over the reputations of their children, and justifying the practice because they are the ones closest to the throne. They even, Harry reports, try to pressure Kate to change her name from Catherine to Katherine so as to avoid having too many royal “C”s. (Kate apparently declined.)

Meanwhile, William, Harry writes, is incensed with the way Harry gets to ignore the rules that regiment William’s own life: The heir must always be beyond reproach, but the spare gets to have fun. William has to shave his beard, but Harry gets to wear his even when in military uniform, in violation of protocol. William has to get married in his bright red Irish Guards uniform even though he prefers to wear the Household Cavalry frock coat uniform, but Harry gets to wear his uniform of choice to his own wedding.

To compensate for the loss of autonomy, Harry writes, William pulls rank constantly. As a teen, he tells Harry not to talk to him when they are both at Eton. As an adult, he seems put off that Meghan goes for a hug rather than a curtsy upon first meeting him. He squabbles over how he and Harry should split up their charitable concerns and tries to veto both Harry’s Invictus Games for wounded veterans and his environmental advocacy in Africa. “I let you have veterans,” he tells Harry, “why can’t you let me have African elephants and rhinos?”

When the tabloids falsely report that Meghan made Kate cry during the lead-up to her wedding with Harry (the truth, as Meghan told Oprah , is that Kate made Meghan cry), Harry traces the story to William, who fed it to Charles and Camilla, who fed it to the press. No correction, he writes, will ever be forthcoming from any of them, “because it would embarrass the future queen. The monarchy always, at all costs, had to be protected.”

Later, Harry writes that William has grown suspicious of the enlightened new attitudes Harry espouses post-Meghan, and post-therapy (suggested by Meghan). He seems to feel almost abandoned, as though Harry has left him behind in the suffocating structure of the monarchy. He refuses to join Harry in therapy, calling him “brainwashed.”

In the midst of one argument, William throws Harry to the floor so forcefully that a dog food dish shatters below him. The act is both violently aggressive and oddly plaintive, like the last resort of a spurned lover. “Come on, we always used to fight,” William says. “You’ll feel better if you hit me.” Harry refuses. As William leaves, he asks Harry not to tell Meghan about the incident and says, “I didn’t attack you, Harold.”

As in all families, deep betrayals and petty nonsense seem to hold equal emotional weight for the Windsors. Harry is justly furious with Camilla for the public relations rehab maneuver, but he’s also angry that she converted one of his many old bedrooms into her dressing room after he moved out, and that she once seemed bored talking to him at afternoon tea. He’s glad she makes his father happy, but he resents her for taking Charles away from him, in the same way that he resents Kate, whom he seems to genuinely like, for taking William away from him.

Harry is ambivalent not just about his family but also about the press, the central villain of this story and an object of fascination for him. He despises them, actively blames them for his mother’s death, compares the sound of a paparazzo’s clicking shutter to the sound of gunfire. He also reads their coverage obsessively, to the point that absorbing press coverage of the royal family seems to be his main hobby. He has nicknames for his least favorite journalists and follows the minutia of their careers with interest. When he bitterly mocks one reporter for starting two sentences in a row with the word “but” in a negative story written about him when he was 15 years old, he does so with the cadence of a man who’s been workshopping the bit in his head nonstop for multiple decades. A therapist suggests that he is addicted to the press, and he doesn’t dispute it.

The root trauma here is, of course, Diana: radiant, beloved, unreachable Diana. Harry was 12 years old when Diana died in a car crash in Paris. After her death, he had to march behind her coffin in a funeral procession while the world watched, and then shake hands and exchange pleasantries with the many mourners who had never met her, and whose hands were often, he writes in a striking detail, wet with their own tears. He himself only cried when Diana was interred, and then felt “ashamed of violating the family ethos.” Then he found himself unable to cry over her again until he was an adult.

In Spare , Harry writes about Diana with a child’s idealization. In his prose, she is beyond saints, beyond goddesses. When he meets a woman who remembers Diana cuddling her on a charity visit when she was a small child, he is overwhelmed with jealousy. Trauma has gnawed holes into all his own memories of his mother.

The army, in Harry’s narrative, both steadies and further traumatizes him. He feels that he grew up while on active duty, that he found his sense of purpose. (He believes wholeheartedly that the war in Afghanistan was just, although he notes that he doesn’t think the army was all that effective at swaying Afghan hearts and minds for the cause of Western democracy. He also makes a point of noting that he made sure each of the 25 people he killed were verified Taliban operatives and not civilians.) But after he returns from his tours, he begins to suffer from panic attacks every time he has to speak in public. Agoraphobia keeps him tethered to the tiny bachelor’s apartment his father has allotted him, watching Friends reruns and identifying with Chandler.

Things will be different, Harry thinks, when he is married. “You weren’t a fully vested member of the Royal Family, indeed a true human being, until you were wed,” he explains. After he’s married, he imagines, he won’t be afraid to go out in public, because his family will start to respect him. His grandmother will stop sticking him in the servant’s wing during holidays at Balmoral, because he’ll have more seniority. His father will up his allowance and give him a family home. He’ll get his beloved brother back, because he and William and Kate and whoever he marries will get to be couple friends together. And he’ll have, at long last, a partner, someone to replace the source of unconditional love he lost when his mother died.

Instead, when Harry marries, Charles tells him that he can’t afford to support both him and the Cambridges. (Supporting his children, Harry notes with outrage, was supposed to be part of Charles’s job as Prince of Wales, not something he did “out of any largesse.” After all, being the sons of the Prince of Wales rendered both William and Harry unemployable.) William darkly repeats tabloid stories about Meghan being pushy and abrasive, while Kate flinches away from Meghan’s American friendliness. And Meghan is so badly harassed by racist tabloids that she begins to struggle with suicidal ideation.

Harry does not explicitly blame the monarchy for any of these problems. In subtext, Spare is a searing indictment of the British crown, which Harry depicts as a force that warps family dynamics under the strength of its imperative: to protect the crown, and those in the direct line of succession, at the expense of everyone else. Yet textually, Harry declares his full-throated support for the monarchy and for his commander-in-chief. He writes lyrically of the “magic” of the crown itself, the beauty of its jewels, of how much he believes it means to the people of the British Commonwealth.

“The crown seemed to possess some inner energy source, something beyond the sum of its parts,” he writes, in an apparent attempt to square the difference. “But all I could think … was how tragic that it should remain locked up in this Tower.” The implication seems to be that the monarchy is strong and powerful and a force for good, but that it’s been hindered by forces that go too far to protect it. The idea appears nowhere else in Spare , and here it feels less than convincing.

Spare does not exist, though, for the monarchy. Spare exists, apparently, for William and Charles, the lost loves of Harry’s life, stolen from him by their wives, by the press, by the institution, by everything they chose before they chose him. He is writing and publishing Spare , he explains in the foreword, in order to explain to them why he felt he had to leave them and the rest of the family behind, to move to California and start over.

He can’t explain it to their faces, he writes. “It would take too long. Besides, they’re clearly not in the right frame of mind to listen. Not now, anyway. Not today. And so: Pa? Willy? World? Here you go.”

The tragedy of Spare is that everything Harry has told us makes it clear that Charles and William will take this memoir not as an explanation or a love letter but as a betrayal worse than anything they ever did to Harry, and that they may not be wrong. Even if they never read it, as seems highly possible, how can they avoid the endless stream of coverage, the interviews Harry has granted about the book, the Netflix documentary that came in December, the nonstop stream of information about Harry and Meghan that the two of them have flung out into the world? You close the book with the queasy sense that in reading it, you’ve been prying into something deathly private, that probably this book should not exist at all.

It’s as though Harry, who hates the press and its constant invasion of his privacy, has had to become press himself in order to finally bring the emotional force of his argument home. Because reading Spare , it’s hard to avoid the thought that we never had any right to these people’s lives at all.

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Spare by Prince Harry review – magical thinking in Montecito

The blockbuster memoir may be a literary success, but it represents an abject failure of insight, writes former Vanity Fair editor and author of The Palace Papers, Tina Brown

O ne of the few good decisions that Prince Harry has made in the last five turbulent years was to take George Clooney’s advice and hire a ghostwriter as skilled as the novelist JR Moehringer. Spare is gripping in its ability to channel Harry’s unresolved emotional pain, his panicky, blinkered drive, his improbably winning rapscallion voice, and his skewed, conflicted worldview. Best of all, Moehringer knows how to drill down into scattered memories and extract the critical details that make this hyper-personal chronicle an unexpected literary success.

Who will forget the scene of monarch and grandson grasping dead pheasants, “their bodies still warm through my gloves” after a Sandringham shoot, confronting each other as she tries to escape in her Range Rover from what she knows is coming. “I’ve been told that, er, that I have to ask your permission to propose [to Meghan],” Harry mumbles. “Well then,” replies her majesty, “I suppose I have to say yes.” It’s one of the joys of this memoir that Harry is still puzzling over her answer. “Was she being sarcastic? Ironic? Was she indulging in a bit of wordplay?” One imagines that gingery face screwed up in a knot of incomprehension that no sentient reader shares about what the queen actually meant.

The most powerful character in the story, Diana , never truly appears, other than in radiant glimpses. The unassuageable anguish of the 12-year-old Harry’s loss gives Moehringer a potent, overarching literary device. His mother, Harry heartbreakingly decided, was not really dead at all. She had “disappeared”, found a way to escape her unhappy, haunted life, and make a “fresh start” (perhaps in Paris or a log cabin in the Alps). Expectation of her Second Coming freezes his heart and will not allow him to cry except once, when her coffin is lowered into the ground at Althorp. The din of the world’s mourning and the endless tawdry explorations of what really happened that night in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, place Harry’s own memories in a lock box even he cannot access until a breakthrough in his mid-30s in a therapist’s office. The only aspect of his mother’s death that he finds unforgettable is the identity of those who caused it: the press and the paps, variously referred to as ghouls, pustules, dogs, weasels, idiots and sadists, who after “torturing” his mother “would come for me”. The “red mist” of his rage towards them never lifts. The reader is with him all the way as the hack-pack humiliates the rudderless prince for every adolescent misstep.

What Harry does not realise, however, is that his magical thinking about Diana’s “disappearance” extends to multiple other aspects of his life. He writes as if he is the first privileged male to notice the unfairness of primogeniture (the “hierarchy”, as he likes to call it with sinister emphasis). Well, duh. The monarchy invented it. The stately homes of England – belonging to many of the people he was at school with – are all inhabited by winners of the birth lottery while the younger siblings are relegated to some mouldy manor house and a sinecure at a bank (if lucky). Harry, we can all agree, has done better than most. At the age of 30, he inherited many millions from Diana and more from the queen mother when she died in 2002. (The fridge at his modest “Nott Cott” bachelor digs within the hardly shabby environs of Kensington Palace is, he tells us, often “stuffed with vacuum packed meals sent by Pa’s chef”.)

It is not so much birth order that is Harry’s problem; it’s the century he was born in, and even more so the one in which he lives. God help anyone who might have told the Red Earl Spencer, Queen Victoria’s mercurial Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to shave off his flaming, efflorescent beard, as William told Harry. Prince Harry of Wales, his descendant, is actually a classic pistol-whirling 19th-century aristocrat always spoiling for a fight, mowing down the enemy in Afghanistan, yomping through Wales with trench foot, trekking the North Pole with a frost-bitten penis that he later cocoons in a “bespoke cock cushion” (an apt description, perhaps, of his Goop-like existence in Montecito). “You’re not terribly concerned, if I may say so, Lieutenant Wales, with dying,” his army helicopter instructor tells him. “I explained I hadn’t been afraid of death since the age of 12.”

Harry’s unreconstructed laddishness eventually starts to get as tiresome for the reader as it did for his family. What grown man of any public profile plays strip billiards with a bunch of random phone-wielding party girls picked up at a Vegas casino? Harry’s jihad against the press often ignores how much he gave them to work with. Charles’s gentle forbearance over the incident is a credit to paternal generosity and tolerance. William, who urges Harry to get help, is depicted by turns as a lugubrious stiff or a petty hysteric who thinks the Africa conservation portfolio Harry wants should be entirely his . His younger brother, one realises, as he obsessively doomscrolls through the sewers of social media and broods on slights real or imagined from his sibling, is addicted to the adrenaline of umbrage. William’s crime seems to be mostly that he grew up and Harry did not. The heir has schooled himself to accept the daunting mantle of a royal destiny, one he no more chose than Harry chose his. The latter had the army as a 10-year refuge, but does not even begin to conceive that William, equally scarred by tragedy, had no refuge at all.

Harry’s most extreme misunderstanding in Spare concerns the topic he affects to know most about: how the deep state of the Palace works. Harry prefers to blame sycophantic double-dealing courtiers when the decisions handed down are those he doesn’t like. By his account, the queen’s private secretary Edward Young blocked the meeting at Sandringham that Harry requested in January 2020 to discuss the Sussexes’ plan to become part-time royals. The possibility that the monarch herself was having second thoughts about the wisdom of such a meeting (Granny’s diary was suddenly full) isn’t entertained.

The debacle of Megxit plunges Harry into a crisis that elicits the most clear-sighted assessment of his own predicament in the entire book. Holed up with Meghan and Archie in a fortified Los Angeles crib courtesy of writer-director Tyler Perry, he reflects that “after decades of being rigorously and systematically infantilised, I was now abruptly abandoned and mocked for being immature”. There are more ironies. While the recurring plaint of Spare is the power that his father and brother hold over his life, the truth is how circumscribed their power actually is. Charles tells his “darling boy” to put all his proposals for a hybrid royal role in writing not because he’s stalling but because, as he says: “It’s all decided by the government.” The worst blow Harry lands on his family is that, just four months before his father’s coronation, he has made them all look so small. When you let daylight in on the Palace, it turns out to be a threadbare movie studio where contract players tot up their self-reported public appearances in the court circular and vie for the biggest roles and the most favourable reviews. In Harry’s telling, most of the family rows are about competition for the best coverage. One example given is that Kate is warned not to pick up a tennis racquet during a visit to a sports centre in case the fetching image takes Charles off the front page. There is an unceasing flow of leaks, background plants and targeted gossip by aides, designed to make one of the principals look good at another’s expense.

As we all know, Harry’s gravamen, the nub of his incandescent fury, is how he and Meghan were sold out by the institution. But one senses that his rage has another source: deep marital embarrassment. Harry’s most profound act of magical thinking was the promise of what he could deliver his bride. In the ecstasies of infatuation – and of relief that he’d finally found someone “perfect, perfect perfect” – he boosted his beloved’s fantasy of their life together as world-dominating humanitarian superstars powered by her Hollywood glamour and his royal stature. Sitting on the Ikea sofa of Nott Cott, how could he tell her that, in the grand scheme of the monarchy, he was a penny-ante prince? His great big dreams revealed how small he was: one can’t help but feel that it’s this that he really wants an apology for.

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The verdict on Prince Harry’s book: Juicy, humorous, resentful and sad

‘spare’ delivers behind-the-scenes vignettes of the royals — and a hefty dose of anger at the family and the media.

“Pandas and royal persons alike,” wrote Hilary Mantel in 2013 , “are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.”

Suppose now that one of those pandas attempts to leave his cage in search of fresh bamboo. So begins the odyssey of Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, who is technically still a prince and duke and still fifth in line to the British throne but who has turned his back on the monarchy for the sake of the woman he loves. An old-school gesture that puts him right up there with his great-great uncle Edward VIII, only the way he’s gone about it is so distinctly 21st century: a self-justifying, multiplatform pilgrimage — Non Mea Culpa , it might be called — which has pivoted from an Oprah sit-down to a Netflix documentary series and which now culminates — or, more likely, gathers steam — with a new memoir, “Spare.”

Tina Brown’s royal revelations spare no one, especially Meghan Markle

The title, in case you’re wondering, is the nickname bestowed on Harry in infancy. He was to be the second-born “Spare” to the “Heir,” his older brother William, future Prince of Wales. “I was the shadow,” he writes now, “the support, the Plan B. I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy.” And if you ever doubted that’s a recipe for resentment, here are 400-plus pages to set you right.

Prince Harry memoir attacks a family he seeks to change. They have no comment.

Like Harry, the book is good-natured, rancorous, humorous, self-righteous, self-deprecating, long-winded. And every so often, bewildering. More questions are answered about the Prince’s todger than you would ever have thought to ask. (It’s circumcised, and it nearly froze to death at the North Pole.) And if you’re wondering to whom Harry lost his virginity, it was an older woman who “liked horses, quite a lot, and treated me not unlike a young stallion. Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me off to graze.”

Written with and almost surely elevated by J.R. Moehringer, who helped make Andre Agassi’s memoir so memorable, the book delivers behind-the-scenes vignettes of the royals (the Queen whisking up salad dressing, Charles executing headstands in his boxers) and liberal helpings of woo-woo: Princess Diana’s spirit turning up variously in a Botswana leopard, an Eton fox and a Tyler Perry painting and even finding a way to mess up Charles and Camilla’s wedding plans. No question that his mother’s 1997 death is still the primal wound in Harry’s now 38-year-old psyche, and the book’s most affecting passages show his 12-year-old self struggling to grieve in public view. He cried just once, at her graveside, then never again, and spent years clinging to the theory that she had simply gone into hiding.

He grew into an indifferent student and a recreational drug user, known variously as “the naughty one” and “the stupid one.” (What was he thinking when he wore a Nazi uniform to a costume party? “I wasn’t.”) Two combat stints gave him a measure of confidence before he settled into the surreal life of a royal — “this unending Truman Show in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never traveled on the Underground.” Whatever relationships he forged couldn’t survive the full-court press of tabloid “paps” dogging his every step. “Royal fame,” he concluded, “was fancy captivity.”

Enter, as you know she must, Meghan.

By now, the stages of their affair are available to anyone who cares: the Instagram sighting, the dinner date, the week in a Botswana tent. So, too, is the mauling Markle received at the hands of British media, a toxic brew of racism and misogyny that too often, says Harry, went unchallenged by Buckingham Palace. No wonder, for Palace staff were either planting the stories or actively courting the reporters behind them. “Pa’s office, Willy’s office,” fumes Harry, “enabling these fiends, if not outright collaborating.”

“Darling boy,” his father counseled, “just don’t read it.” Not an option for Harry, who was, by his own admission, “undeniably addicted” to reading and raging at his own media coverage. But when he decided to step away from royal duties, the rage came back at him: William, according to one already well-publicized anecdote, grabbed him by the collar and knocked him to the ground. Stripped of their royal allowance and eventually their security detail, Harry and Meg fled first to Canada before settling in America, or, as Harry cheekily calls it, “the undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveler returns.”

Meghan and Harry made a fairy-tale escape. They still seem trapped.

So meet them in their current iteration: still gorgeous, parents to two gorgeous children — and also, the author tactfully concedes, drawing on “corporate partnerships” to “spotlight the causes we cared about, to tell the stories we felt were vital. And to pay for our security.” In a more rueful vein: “I love my Mother Country, and I love my family, and I always will. I just wish, at the second-darkest moment of my life, they’d both been there for me.”

Yet, in a perverse way, they were there for him, and he for them. The brand he and Meghan have so carefully nurtured is entirely dependent on the brand they so publicly cast off. With each morsel of palace scandal they lob into the news cycle, they feed the beast they deplore, and it will never end, and, for the Windsors’ sakes, can never end because that would mean our interest in them has run dry. One ends up almost longing for the days when royals just poisoned each other or waged civil war. If nothing else, they got it out of their systems.

Louis Bayard is the author of “The Pale Blue Eye” and “Jackie & Me.”

By Prince Harry the Duke of Sussex

Random House. 416 pp. $36

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Prince Harry’s Book Is Just Good Literature

I don’t give a fig about the royals, but much of spare reads like a good novel..

In Spare , his blockbuster memoir, Prince Harry recounts that during a 2015 interview shortly after his brother’s second child was born, a journalist told him that his gadabout single life had caused some to liken him to Bridget Jones. Harry was perplexed by the comparison, but in the context of Spare , it’s an apt one. At its best, the prince’s memoir reads like one of those popular late-1990s novels about British singletons blundering their way out of solipsistic immaturity into self-awareness and true love: if not quite Bridget Jones’s Diary , certainly High Fidelity or About a Boy .

To be clear, my idea of the best parts of Spare is unlikely to coincide with the notions of most of the book’s readers. I don’t care about the British royal family and have never paid much attention to their doings—a position that goes all the way back to Princess Diana, Harry’s mother. I cracked open Spare with only a dim sense of its narrative outline: Harry married the American actress Meghan Markle, but racist coverage of the couple in Britain’s tabloid press caused them to attempt to escape the public eye by quitting whatever it was they did as members of the royal family and moving to America. Feuding of the immensely tedious type that gossip columnists adore was involved. What could Spare possibly have to offer the kind of reader who’d rather chew broken glass than have to hear about bridesmaids’ dresses?

To my surprise, the first half of Spare turns out to be a fascinating literary venture. This is surely all down to Harry’s collaborator, J.R. Moehringer, one of the most sought-after ghostwriters in the business, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, and the author of his own bestselling memoir, The Tender Bar . When ghostwriting Andre Agassi’s memoir Open , Moehringer moved to Las Vegas, where Agassi lives, for two years , interviewing the tennis star for many, many hours to produce what’s widely considered the gold standard in sports autobiography.

By his own admission, Harry is “not really big on books,” and while he was blown away by the Faulkner quote he uses as Spare ’s epigraph—“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”—his first thought upon encountering the lines on BrainyQuote.com was “Who the fook is Faulkner?” The Harry of Spare is a blokey bloke, a man more of action than of thought or words. He prefers outdoor adventure, video games, drinking with his mates. He loved being in the army, the physical challenges of basic training, flying Apache helicopters, and his two operational tours of duty in Afghanistan. He joined expeditions to both the South and North Poles, confessing in the book (to the unending delight of journalists, whatever their pretensions to the contrary) that during the latter he contracted a case of frostnip in his “todger.”

Books—whether novels or memoirs—aren’t written or read by people like this, and the people who do write books aren’t inclined to devote much attention to them. How to put into words the inner life of someone who doesn’t really reflect on, let alone cultivate, his inner life? Phil Knight, whose memoir was also ghostwritten by Moehringer, described his collaborator to the New York Times as “ half psychiatrist. … He gets you to say things you really didn’t think you would .” It’s impossible to read Spare without thinking, multiple times per page, of the intensive interviews that produced it, of how Moehringer must have pressed Harry to recall the sensual minutiae that make Spare feel so intimate. Take this description of the linens at Balmoral Castle:

The bedding was clean, crisp, various shades of white. Alabaster sheets. Cream blankets. Eggshell quilts. (Much of it stamped with ER, Elizabeth Regina .) Everything was pulled tight as a snare drum, so expertly smoothed that you could easily spot the century’s worth of patched holes and tears.

This shows a literary writer’s knack for detail that summons not only the smooth texture of the sheets beneath the hand but also what they convey about the rigor of the housekeeping and the genteel economy of the mending. (Nothing says old money like the careful preservation of excellent old sheets.) I would also take bets that Prince Harry has never in his life used the term “eggshell quilts” uncoached. The first half of Spare is studded with such details, from the “clinking bridles and clopping hooves” of the horses that pull the carriage carrying his mother’s coffin in her funeral cortege, to the likening of the smooth surface of the Okavango River in Botswana to a “poreless cheek.”

Men like Harry, who have the opposite of a writer’s temperament and tastes, and who perhaps bullied writerly kids at school, usually show up as antagonists in literary fiction and memoir. Moehringer, on the other hand, needs to make this alien creature endearing. Some choices are obvious, such as organizing Harry’s personality around his grief at the death of his mother in 1997 and his hurt at being relegated to an ancillary role as the “spare” to his older brother’s heir. Other, smaller touches are more artful. For every stupid, bro-ish stunt for which Harry must dutifully apologize (such as dressing up as a Nazi for a costume party in 2005—he says his brother and sister-in-law put him up to it ), there’s a mischievous exploit like sneaking into a farm with a friend as schoolboys and stuffing their faces with filched strawberries. Shades of those lovable hobbit scamps Merry Brandybuck and Pippin Took in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings !

And Moehringer largely succeeds at his mission. His Prince Harry is a likable, not-too-complicated dude who occasionally, and rather improbably, gives himself over to wondering if Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII are “floating in some airy realm, still mulling their choices, or were they Nowhere, thinking Nothing? Could there really be Nothing after this? Does consciousness, like time, have a stop?” (On the other hand, it seems more plausible that Harry believes his late mother has visited him in the form of various animals.) Every prince needs a dragon, and Harry’s is the media, specifically the “paps” (paparazzi) and the tabloids who hire them, for hounding his mother to her death and scuttling most of his relationships before he met Markle. “If I had a choice, I wouldn’t want this life either,” he tells himself when he breaks up with a girlfriend daunted by the reporters pestering her and her family.

It’s possible to feel sympathy for Harry, who never learned how to live another kind of life, without endorsing the absurdities of hereditary monarchy in the 21 st century. With his physical courage and old-fashioned manliness, he would have made an excellent medieval prince. Today, however, royalty has something in common with Bridget Jones regardless of their relationship status: Like Bridget, they work in public relations. Their job (as Harry admits) is to use their entirely unearned fame to “raise awareness” of various worthy causes, which further burnishes their own fame. This is what Harry and his family describe as their work, and it can’t be done without the very press that also torments them.

By Prince Harry

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After Markle comes into Spare , a little past the halfway point, the memoir surrenders its lovely, episodic, ruminative moments to prosecute the many mind-numbing disputes and grudges the couple has with his parents and brother. The British tabloid press behaves shockingly, but even outrage at its flagrant racism could not sustain my interest through long passages about wedding arrangements and housing options. Spare becomes more Harry’s book than Moehringer’s and in the process loses the sweetness and generosity that suffuse its first half. The writing also becomes notably more pedestrian. It left me wishing Moehringer would write a novel about a man much like Harry, a simple man in an impossible situation, seeking a meaningful place for himself in the world. A light novel, a sweet novel, a comically romantic novel. And above all, a novel that ends before the wedding.

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What critics are saying about Prince Harry’s memoir ‘Spare’

Whether or not critics like the book has not impacted sales — it’s already a best seller.

By Margaret Darby

After months of anticipation, Prince Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” has officially hit the shelves — not to be mistaken with the widespread leaks from the book which surfaced last week, as reported by the Deseret News .

So far, critics have not gone easy on the memoir. The Guardian called the book “a flawed attempt to reclaim the narrative.”

Regardless of how critics feel about “Spare,” the book is a hit. According to The Washington Post , the memoir is already at the top of bestseller lists.

“As far as we know, the only books to have sold more in their first day are those starring the other Harry (Potter),” said the memoir’s publisher, per Sky News .

Here are the initial reviews from critics and fans on “Spare.”

First reactions to ‘Spare’

• “At once emotional and embittered, the royal memoir is mired in a paradox: drawing endless attention in an effort to renounce fame,” Alexandra Jacobs wrote for The New York Times .
• Sean Coughlan, a royal correspondent said “Spare” is “part confession, part rant and part love letter. In places it feels like the longest angry drunk text ever sent,” per the BBC .
• According to Lucy Pavia with the Independent , the book “sets fire to the royal family.” Pavis claims the book is “beautifully” written and “doesn’t so much lift the curtain on private royal life than rip it off and shake out its contents.”
• “Harry comes across as honest and reflective, but also angry, thin-skinned, disoriented” Henry Mance wrote in the Financial Times .
• The London Times called the book a “400-page therapy session for mystic Harry,” wrote James Marriott. “Open the book and you discover quite a different Harry from the cool, square-jawed metrosexual Californian on the cover. This is a weirder, more complex Harry.”
• The Economist called the memoir an “ill-advised romp.”

Fan reactions to ‘Spare’

Fans have gone easier on the book than critics. Some fans are sympathetic to Harry and what he has gone through, while some think it’s time Harry practice a little gratitude and others simply shared lighthearted jokes about the memoir.

I'm fifty pages into "Spare" and it's so desperately sad: the tone is very different to how all the out-of-context quotes make it seem. Although he keeps making jokes - mainly self-deprecating - it just ACHES. — Caitlin Moran (@caitlinmoran) January 10, 2023

#PrinceHarry has the privilege and opportunities to have an amazing life. He has $100 Million in the bank, a wife and children and he wants us to go oh poor Harry he must speak his truth. He’s not 12, grow up and his invasion of his family’s privacy is creepy & sick. #Spare — The British Prince (@Freedom16356531) January 10, 2023

Pretty funny Harry is ridiculing Prince William’s “alarming baldness.” #Spare #BrotherBetrayal pic.twitter.com/ikzW1qr1J6 — DT Cahill (@DTCahill) January 10, 2023

#SpareUsHarry Anxiously awaiting Wills follow up Tell-Book in response to "Spare" pic.twitter.com/XXrGdf1pvh — Emily Harrison (@emharrison75) January 9, 2023

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Spare Hardcover – January 10, 2023

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• Print length 416 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Random House
• Publication date January 10, 2023
• Dimensions 6.38 x 1.24 x 9.56 inches
• ISBN-10 0593593804
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; First US Edition (January 10, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593593804
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593593806
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.63 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.38 x 1.24 x 9.56 inches
• #1 in Historical British Biographies
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• #43 in Memoirs (Books)

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Debbie Harry Stares Back

The Blondie singer’s memoir, Face It, wryly recounts making the most of being ogled.

After speeding through Debbie Harry’s eventful life in just 245 pages, the Blondie singer’s memoir, Face It , in its final chapter, lists stuff about thumbs. “I think first of that game where you try to trap the other guy’s thumb under yours while the rest of your fingers are gripping their fingers,” the 74-year-old Harry writes. “Then there is the old saying ‘I’m all thumbs,’ which is a peculiar mental image and is a feeble excuse for clumsiness.” Opposable thumbs, hitchhiking thumbs, thumbs up, thumbs down, Tom Thumb, thumbnail sketches, strangler’s thumbs, thumbscrews, thumbtacks, twiddling thumbs … each concept gets briefly discussed, making for five pages of thumb content.

There is no grand point to this exercise. “I thought a little bit of levity might be a good way to end my somewhat morose memoir, hence all this thumb business,” she explains, which just adds more bafflement to the pile. Harry’s memoir is not, in fact, a bummer. It’s true that she’s been stalked, raped, addicted to heroin, and hassled by Patti Smith, but Harry relates each incident, bad and good, with a “that’s life” literary deadpan. The rape, for example—by a knife-wielding home invader in ’70s New York City—did not inspire “a lot of fear” in her because “this happened before AIDS.” The worst thing about the attack, she writes, is that the rapist stole some of her guitars.

It’s hard to put your, um, finger on the Harry that emerges from Face It . While other aging-rocker memoirs have earned press for the gossip they’ve revealed, so far the biggest brouhaha about Harry’s book has been about a clumsy attempt at summing her up. “In her memoir, Debbie Harry proves she’s more than just a pretty blonde in tight pants,” read a Washington Post tweet that went viral for the wrong reasons. Sibbie O’Sullivan’s corresponding book review began with disdain (“Even if Debbie Harry, of the band Blondie, isn’t to your taste—her voice too thin, her sexiness too blatant, her music too smooth—you can’t dismiss certain truths about her”) and ended with the backhanded praise of the tweet. In the scorn storm that brewed on social media in response , the journalist Alicia Lutes asked, “Legitimately who has ever thought so little about Debbie fucking Harry?”

One revelation of the memoir is that the public hasn’t been given a ton to think, good or bad, about Harry over the years. Absolutely there’s a well of fervent and uncomplicated admiration for Blondie’s music, which includes some of the most crystalline pleasure-rushes of the ’70s and ’80s: “Heart of Glass,” “Hanging on the Telephone,” “One Way or Another,” “Call Me.” Definitely she’s remembered as a fixture of CBGB, the legendary New York City punk club. But when I went to look up her role in Please Kill Me , the canonical dirt download about that era and place, I found an interview in which she told the writer Legs McNeil, “Supposed to be questions about fucking punk, man,” when he asked about her backstory. Now, with Face It, Harry is here to fill in some of the blanks—briskly, humorously, and mixed in with abstract riffs on appendages and animals.

Her anecdotes begin with her adoption in New Jersey at three months old. “They claim it’s unusual to have memories of your earliest moments,” she writes, “but I have tons.” Quickly, her life began to be shaped by that which O’Sullivan’s review fixated on: her beauty. “Even as a little girl, I always attracted sexual attention,” she writes, before wryly running through vignettes about the male gaze. A doctor admired her “bedroom eyes” when she was a baby; a stranger exposed himself to her when she was 8; when on vacation as a preteen, the big-band drummer Buddy Rich, then in his late 30s, followed her home. Her early jobs included waiting tables at the rock venue Max’s Kansas City—“It was all such a big flirtation, such a scene”—and being a bunny at the Playboy Club, where the patrons were mostly polite to her.

Her entrée into rock came through her friendship with the seminal cross-dressing troublemakers the New York Dolls, and her first band, the Stilettos, was fronted by three women. The next band, Blondie and the Banzai Babes, initially featured two female backup singers. By the time it became just Blondie, Harry was the indisputable focal point, though the music was heavily shaped by the other members, including her longtime creative and romantic partner Chris Stein . “My idea was to bring dancing back to rock,” Harry writes of her musical vision. She recalls an early gig in which the opening band, the Ramones, were kicked out by the bar owners, but the Banzai Babes got to stay. Writes Harry: “They liked us because we were cute girls—harmless. Ha!”

Leveraging sexist condescension to her advantage continued to be integral to her career. Harry’s persona in Blondie paid tribute to the Marilyn Monroe bombshell type, she writes, because Harry “felt that Marilyn was also playing a character, the proverbial dumb blonde with the little-girl voice and big-girl body, and that there was a lot of smarts behind the act.” Over the years, she embraced cosmetic surgery unapologetically: “It’s the same as having a flu shot, basically, another way to look after yourself.” Always, she prized control when it came to using physical appeal. When her record company promoted a Blondie album with an image of her in a see-through top, she was livid. “Sex sells, that’s what they say, and I’m not stupid, I know that,” she writes. “But on my terms, not some executive’s.”

Despite all this history, late in the book Harry claims to have been surprised when her manager suggested she write about how she “broke ground as a female artist.” She just seems uninterested in being didactic on this subject: “I know there is misogyny and I know there is bias, but I’m more concerned with being good at what I do.” She’s also uninterested in getting very deep on certain personal mysteries, like the question of why she and Stein broke up in 1987 after more than a decade together. Her point of view as a songwriter gets only brief, sporadic treatment, though she does hit some highlights, such as her prescient brush with hip-hop on 1981’s “ Rapture .”

On the final page, she admits, “I still have so much more to tell but being such a private person, I might not tell everything … It’s always best to leave the audience wanting more.” Holding back is an understandable maneuver for someone who’s been stared at so much, and it’s not quite right to call Face It evasive. She always comes off as tough and matter-of-fact and New York–y, very much the voice that complained about love as a “pain in the ass” in “Heart of Glass,” or that facetiously took down some “groupie supreme” in “Rip Her to Shreds.” Knowing that there are still those who expect her to be simply “a blonde in tight pants,” she tells her life story how she wants to tell it. And when she gets tired of sharing, Harry is kind enough not to extend a middle finger.

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Let’s Say Someone Did Drop the Bomb. Then What?

In “Nuclear War” and “Countdown,” Annie Jacobsen and Sarah Scoles talk to the people whose job it is to prepare for atomic conflict.

Evidence of the first test of a full-scale thermonuclear device rises over the Marshall Islands on the morning of Nov. 1, 1952. Credit... Los Alamos National Laboratory, via Associated Press

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By Barry Gewen

Barry Gewen is a former editor at the Book Review and the author of “The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World.” He is working on a book about nuclear proliferation.

• March 24, 2024

NUCLEAR WAR: A Scenario, by Annie Jacobsen

COUNTDOWN: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons, by Sarah Scoles

When it comes to nuclear catastrophe, there is a large and ever-expanding body of books and films .

Movies have an obvious visual advantage (what is more photogenic than a mushroom cloud?), but books like Annie Jacobsen’s gripping “Nuclear War: A Scenario” are essential if you want to understand the complex and disturbing details that go into a civilization-destroying decision to drop the Bomb on an enemy.

Jacobsen, the author of “The Pentagon’s Brain,” has done her homework. She has spent more than a decade interviewing dozens of experts while mastering the voluminous literature on the subject, some of it declassified only in recent years. “Nuclear war is insane,” she writes. “Every person I interviewed for this book knows this.” Yet the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads remains unsheathed.

Numbers tell the terrifying story by themselves. A one-megaton bomb dropped on the Pentagon would kill about a million people in the first two minutes, and the subsequent war would be a march toward Armageddon. She estimates that, by its end, at least two billion individuals would lose their lives.

Jacobsen calls this genocide, but then goes further, describing a mass extinction event from the postwar impact of nuclear winter and the degradation of the ozone layer. “As long as nuclear war exists as a possibility,” she says, “the survival of the human species hangs in the balance.”

Jacobsen lays out an imaginary narrative that begins with North Korea launching a missile against the United States. The “why” — Kim Jong-un is paranoid? resentful? a “mad king”? — is less important than the “how” of procedure, because nine governments possess nuclear weapons, and for many of them the decision to kill millions of people in an instant rests with one man, whether Kim, Vladimir Putin or the president of the United States. (During the Watergate crisis, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, worried that a drunken and brooding Richard Nixon might decide to launch a nuclear strike, reportedly told the Pentagon’s leaders to check with him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger before following a directive from the White House.)

In Jacobsen’s telling, Washington fires interceptors to take down the missile but these fail because, as she explains, tests of America’s interceptor system have produced dismal results. “With 44 interceptor missiles in its entire inventory, the U.S. interceptor program is mostly for show.”

Now the doomsday clock begins ticking. Jacobsen proceeds minute by minute, even second by second. After the detection of the North Korean missile, the president has just six minutes to decide whether to fire America’s own missiles in a counterattack, turning much of North Korea into dust and inviting involvement by the Russians and Chinese.

One of Jacobsen’s major themes is that apocalyptic choices have to be made in a frighteningly short amount of time. In her scenario, it takes 72 minutes for the world as we know it to come to an end. (During the 1960s, the political satirist Tom Lehrer sang about World War III lasting an hour and a half — not much has changed since then.)

Jacobsen has a second theme designed to keep her readers awake at night. Traditionally, in the “fog of war,” high-level strategies are inevitably disrupted, meticulously designed plans go awry, numerous mistakes and miscalculations are made — and nuclear conflict is the foggiest of wars. There has never been a nuclear exchange, so no one really knows what would happen, and all the carefully calibrated, algorithmically determined projections of the Pentagon and its think tanks may not be worth the computer paper they are printed on.

How can one foresee the impact of widespread panic, the breakdown of public services, the collapse of the military’s command and control networks, the anarchic violence and every-man-for-himself ethos bound to follow? In Jacobsen’s plot, North Korea also launches other missiles, including a high-altitude explosive that knocks out America’s power grid in what a former senior C.I.A. official calls “electric Armageddon.”

Jacobsen says more than once that “nuclear war has no rules,” but that’s not quite true. There is one prediction we can safely make: Apart from the countless deaths, the result of a nuclear war would be total chaos for those who survived. Nikita Khrushchev, of all people, said that in the aftermath, the living would envy the dead .

Can anything be done to save us from ourselves? Jacobsen points an accusing finger at the doctrine of deterrence, which has been America’s governing policy for decades. Since the nation’s enemies know that any nuclear attack would be met with an overwhelming response, they are deterred from starting a war they know ahead of time they cannot control.

But Jacobsen notes that deterrence, which has a spotless record so far, works only until it doesn’t. Should a nuclear conflict break out, either by accident, a misunderstanding or the decision of a crazed leader, Jacobsen’s end-of-the-world scenario becomes much more plausible. There is no Plan B if deterrence fails.

So far, so good (or bad), but it is at this point that the questions begin. What is her Plan B? If she favors abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, she owes it to her readers to say so, and then explain how it could be done. How do we get from here to there?

Deterrence theory was devised following Hiroshima and Nagasaki by farseeing thinkers like Bernard Brodie , who grasped that the development of nuclear weapons had irrevocably changed the entire nature of warfare, and that the threat of aggression by a rival power had to be met defensively, and peacefully, by deterrence. There was no alternative.

Entire schools of thought have grown up around the proposition that the Cold War never turned hot because of the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons. And there is a legitimate argument to be made that the only reason we are not at war right now with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine is the existence of nuclear weapons. (See also: Taiwan.)

Among the people who appreciate the importance of deterrence are the individuals who populate “Countdown,” by Sarah Scoles, a journalist and contributing editor at Scientific American. The subjects of this rather discursive book include former hippies and competitive speedskaters, but most seem to be born physicists who at an early age aspired to be astronauts or wanted to explore what makes the universe tick.

Now they “toil in obscurity” at facilities like the Los Alamos National Laboratory. They are charged with the responsibility of securing and modernizing America’s deterrence system, and their jobs include testing the components of nuclear weapons, checking that missiles function the way they are supposed to and tracking plutonium to ensure that none of it is diverted. Some spend their time trying to pick up clues of any advances other countries are making in nuclear technology.

This is incredibly important work, costing hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps trillions, and the people who got into it seem to have done so because they wanted to do something meaningful with the scientific expertise they had acquired at school. “I honestly feel that I’m serving my country working here at the lab,” one says. In the 19th century, Baudelaire observed that the heroes of modern life were individuals who wore frock coats. Today, we might say they wear lab jackets.

Not everyone would agree. Scoles portrays scientists who often feel misunderstood and under siege by those convinced that the fastest way to end the nuclear threat is simply to abolish the weapons themselves. Tell your friends that your job is modernizing America’s missile system and count how many of them you lose. Protesters regularly demonstrate outside the labs. “Evil” is a word routinely hurled at the researchers. They are even drilled in how to argue with those who accuse them of being warmongers.

Significantly, the labs are having trouble recruiting talented young replacements because of the anti-nuke and antiwar beliefs that are common on American campuses. Who wants to work on projects that could kill millions of people when you can have the personal satisfaction of marching outside a nuclear lab as your contribution to “world peace”? Meanwhile, the population of scientists experienced in nuclear affairs is graying and shrinking, producing a “worker gap.” Scoles reports that as much as 40 percent of the current work force at the National Nuclear Security Administration will be eligible for retirement over the next few years.

Yet she also demonstrates that many, if not most, of the scientists doing nuclear work have attitudes not all that different from those of the marching students. They too believe in abolishing nuclear weapons. They just don’t think it will happen simply by holding up a sign and wishing for it. Convinced that the United States has no choice but to keep its deterrence system safe, secure and operational, they live inside a paradox difficult for outsiders to understand.

They are embodiments of an antique maxim of international relations: If you want to prevent war, you have to prepare for war. “These things can’t just be put away,” one scientist tells Scoles. In his youth, he favored abolition. Now he asks, “How do you then manage policy that makes sure that they never get used in anger again?” Another, her exasperation showing, was blunter. “You know what? Nuclear weapons exist.” One might add that they are not about to go away anytime soon.

NUCLEAR WAR : A Scenario | By Annie Jacobsen | Dutton | 373 pp. | $27

COUNTDOWN : The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons | By Sarah Scoles | Bold Type | 264 pp. | $30

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