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
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
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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