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 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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