Spencer Tracy (1900–1967), warts and all.
Acclaimed biographer Curtis (W.C. Fields, 2003, etc.) presents an exhaustive and exhausting biography of the legendary Hollywood star, famed for his uncanny naturalism and authority on camera and best remembered for the series of films he made with longtime companion Katharine Hepburn. Impeccably researched, Curtis’ doorstopper chronicles Tracy’s steady rise from stock company star to Broadway sensation to silver screen icon in copious and sometimes plodding detail, recording salary negotiations, scheduling conflicts and press notices with laser-like focus. Happily, the author is equally expansive on the production details of Tracy’s many classic films, his friendships and affairs with fellow glitterati and the culture of working actors in a variety of milieus. The heart of the book concerns Tracy’s turbulent relationship with Hepburn; in Curtis’ telling, it was a miraculous meeting of two diametrically opposed and difficult temperaments in which the neuroses and rough edges of each party found succor and understanding in the other. Truthfully, they both come across as monumentally annoying, and Tracy’s lugubrious personality—guilt-ridden, painfully sensitive, diffident, gloomy—casts a bit of a pall over the narrative. Curtis is scrupulous but not salacious in documenting Tracy’s catastrophic alcoholism and philandering. His long-suffering wife Louise (they never divorced, despite the open secret of his decades-long affair with Hepburn) emerges as an unlikely hero, an intelligent and proud woman who devoted her life to the establishment and expansion of The John Tracy Clinic, named for the couple’s deaf son and tasked with improving the lot of deaf children and their parents through education and progressive treatments. Tracy regularly supplied funding for the clinic and seemed to regard its existence as the noblest aspect of his legacy—unsurprising for a self-loathing man who always reckoned he should have become a doctor or a priest and regarded his chosen profession as an embarrassment. A monumental, definitive biography of one the finest film actors in the history of the medium.
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-26289-9
Page Count: 1056
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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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