A lively but incomplete biography, carried more by its subject than its author.
A heavily conversational biography of the strong-willed film legend.
Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) wasn’t the most conventionally attractive actress, but her no-nonsense attitude and deep intelligence helped make her a star. In a style similar to her other “personal biographies” (She Always Knew How: Mae West, 2009), Chandler largely constructs the narrative around extended quotes from interviews conducted in the 1970s and ’80s, with additional brief commentary from friends, directors and co-stars like George Cukor, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Christopher Reeve. Hepburn openly discusses her failed early marriage, her relationships (and sex life) with Howard Hughes and Spencer Tracy, her frustrations on the set of The African Queen (1951) and her reputation for being prickly and something of a chatterbox—Jimmy Stewart recalls a particularly exhausting plane ride with her while filming The Philadelphia Story (1940). Chandler’s approach has plenty of shortcomings. The text is needlessly littered with plot summaries of most of Hepburn’s films, with equal weight given to both major works like Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Summertime (1955) and minor ones like The Little Minister (1934). Inevitably, the relative dearth of traditional research makes the book feel more like an extended interview than a rigorously reported life. Hepburn emerges as a woman with a fair bit of baggage and a romantic streak that belied her sharp edges, but serious fans already know that—she brought a similar candor to her own memoirs, The Making of The African Queen (1987) and Me (1991). The best parts of Chandler’s book come in the final pages, as Hepburn engagingly speaks about how she enjoyed detaching from her film persona—which she called the “Creature”—to live privately, and how she would’ve liked to have played the lead in the 1945 film I Know Where I’m Going!, which gives this book its title.
A lively but incomplete biography, carried more by its subject than its author.Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-4928-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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
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