A psycho-bio of the actress and her mother that begins as riveting melodrama and turns into talk-show buffalo chips. Leaming (Bette Davis, 1992, etc.) deconstructs Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy: No longer the lovers we cherish, they're just another pair of dysfunctional codependents. Tracy was a self- loathing alcoholic who degraded Hepburn to prove his own worthlessness; Hepburn was a one-woman rescue squad who slept in the hallway outside his room at the Beverly Hills Hotel and fed him fudge sundaes to keep him sober. Why did she choose dark, self- destructive men (not only Tracy but also poet H. Phelps Putnam, Howard Hughes, and director John Ford, whom she almost married)? According to Leaming, it was because at 13 she was too late to rescue her elder brother Tom, whose body she found hanging from the ceiling of a New York City attic. The Hepburn family lived through five suicides: Tom's and those of Hepburn's maternal grandfather and three uncles. Leaming describes Hepburn as using her beauty and fabulous vitality to keep the life in the men she loved. Her well- known movie and stage career is sketched in mainly in the context of Leaming's psychological profile. More rewarding is the story of Hepburn's mother, Kathy, whose father, Fred, shot himself, leaving his wife, Carrie Houghton, and three young daughters to fend for themselves. Leaming, who was privy to newly discovered family papers, tells a Victorian melodrama to rival Little Women as a parable of family love and empowerment. After Carrie's death from stomach cancer, teenage Kathy shepherded herself and her sisters through Bryn Mawr against the wishes of her senior male relatives and the opprobrium of a society that believed higher education could destroy a woman's reproductive organs. The Ford gossip is news, but better than the psychobabble about Kate is the inspiring story of her mother, a strong, complex heroine if ever there was one. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-517-59284-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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