A psycho-bio of the actress and her mother that begins as riveting melodrama and turns into talk-show buffalo chips. Leaming (Bette Davis, 1992, etc.) deconstructs Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy: No longer the lovers we cherish, they're just another pair of dysfunctional codependents. Tracy was a self- loathing alcoholic who degraded Hepburn to prove his own worthlessness; Hepburn was a one-woman rescue squad who slept in the hallway outside his room at the Beverly Hills Hotel and fed him fudge sundaes to keep him sober. Why did she choose dark, self- destructive men (not only Tracy but also poet H. Phelps Putnam, Howard Hughes, and director John Ford, whom she almost married)? According to Leaming, it was because at 13 she was too late to rescue her elder brother Tom, whose body she found hanging from the ceiling of a New York City attic. The Hepburn family lived through five suicides: Tom's and those of Hepburn's maternal grandfather and three uncles. Leaming describes Hepburn as using her beauty and fabulous vitality to keep the life in the men she loved. Her well- known movie and stage career is sketched in mainly in the context of Leaming's psychological profile. More rewarding is the story of Hepburn's mother, Kathy, whose father, Fred, shot himself, leaving his wife, Carrie Houghton, and three young daughters to fend for themselves. Leaming, who was privy to newly discovered family papers, tells a Victorian melodrama to rival Little Women as a parable of family love and empowerment. After Carrie's death from stomach cancer, teenage Kathy shepherded herself and her sisters through Bryn Mawr against the wishes of her senior male relatives and the opprobrium of a society that believed higher education could destroy a woman's reproductive organs. The Ford gossip is news, but better than the psychobabble about Kate is the inspiring story of her mother, a strong, complex heroine if ever there was one. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-517-59284-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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