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Spencer Tracy (2011)

by James Curtis(Favorite Author)

3.9 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0307262898 (ISBN13: 9780307262899)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Knopf

review 1: While I knew of Tracy's demons and failings before I started reading this scrupulously researched and written book, there was a great deal more to learn about him. Most interesting to me was finally learning about his long-estranged but still very much in his life wife, Louise, who usually rates no more than 'the wife he wouldn't divorce because he was Catholic'. The jury is still out on how I feel about Hepburn, his bossy, pushy, over-protective partner of three decades. This book is a must-read for movie lovers of that by-gone golden age of stars. The behind the scenes look at all of Tracy's plays and movies was a bit too detailed for me at times and I found myself skipping through these but they were interdispersed with wonderful stories and anecdotes about the famous p... moreeople around him. I came out of this book with a warm feeling for this flawed man.
review 2: Exhaustive and exhausting, this meticulously researched biography is everything you could really hope for. The first half feels far more personal, but once Tracy spends more and more time away from his family, considerable detail on his personal life is dependent on Katharine Hepburn as a source, and I've always gotten the impression that much of what she said about Spencer Tracy was very calculated to create a specific mythology, and then, much of the research in the second half is by necessity more distant. As Tracy gets older, those colleagues that Curtis quotes grow more and more awestruck with Tracy and less a personal friend. This is not, of course, a fault in Curtis's book, mind you, but an observation of the resources he had at his disposal. This will forever be the authoritative work on Tracy and a consistently fascinating read that took me weeks but was a pleasure every step of the way. less

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