Parish regards Hepburn more objectively than most of her other biographers, but he comes up with little that is definitive...
To the often-told stories of Hepburn’s life, this latest biography promises to add the untold.
Was Katharine Hepburn a lesbian? That’s the question framing this otherwise rather pointless cut-and-paste biography of the star. Early on, Parish (Jet Li, 2002) examines Hepburn’s relationship with her brother Tom. Athletic, but sensitive, he hung himself at 15. Had classmates discovered him having sex with another man? Had he and his sister been incestuous? With little concrete evidence, Parish is left to speculate. He draws inferences as well about Hepburn’s relationships with several women, including Laura Harding, Irene Mayer Selznick and Hepburn’s longtime companion, Phyllis Wilbourn. During Hepburn’s early days in Hollywood, she and Harding shared a house, leaving Hepburn’s bisexual husband, Ludlow Ogden Smith, back East. But again lacking hard evidence, Parish can say only that Hepburn may have been a lesbian. His repeated implication—that because Hepburn consorted with lesbians, she, too, may have been a lesbian—ought to annoy gay and straight readers alike. Keen to Hepburn’s skill at controlling media, Parish also suggests the actress drew attention away from persistent rumors she was a lesbian by greatly enhancing accounts of her relationships with Howard Hughes and Spencer Tracy. Hepburn, Parish says, implied the affairs were sexual when they were really platonic. In particular, he adds, Hepburn publicly transformed her affair with Tracy, a miserable alcoholic who may have been bisexual, into one of the great love stories of our time. Hepburn, Parish writes, “was a master of illusion both on and off the screen.”
Parish regards Hepburn more objectively than most of her other biographers, but he comes up with little that is definitive or new—perhaps because of the dearth and deaths of primary sources to document her (sex) life.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-55583-891-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Advocate Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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