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 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
