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
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
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