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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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