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
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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