Spencer Tracy Books

If you like/love Tracy and Hepburn in movies, you'll love this book. It's a true account of their lives and how their affair came about, how it was hidden to the world (insiders in Hollywood knew all about it). In fact, it was so well hidden (Kate used to always slip in the back way at hotels), that Tracy's wife upon meeting Hepburn told her she was shocked, that she thought the affair was only a rumor. A very good read, you won't be disappointed.

I have always thought that Tracy and Hepburn were a Great couple in Movies, but they were amazing in real life too. The book was a very good history of each of their lives and how they became intertwined. I think it is one of the best books that I have ever read.

I have been looking for years for a Spencer Tracy biography and this is about as close as I could find. I have to say I was very pleasantly surpried by this book. First off, it is a quick and easy read and is especially well written for one of these Hollywood tomes. Secondly, rather than just telling the story of the Tracy/Hepburn love affair, it gives you so much background on both stars that I feel as though I have gotten my long sought after Tracy bio. Finally, the book helps the reader to understand that there really is no understanding a love like Tracy and Hepburn shared. Neither could put it into words and neither seemed interested in doing such. Rather than a lot of psycho babble that you usually get in these types of books, the author realizes that there is no accounting for taste and there is no explaining love.

I found An Affair to Remember a truly remarkable portrait of Hepburn and Spencer's lives (before and after they met). The book was interesting and well written. A great pick for anyone interested in either actor.

These two screen giants met on the set of Woman of the Year in 1942 and were together until Spencer died of a heart attack, shortly after wrapping up Guess Whose Coming to Dinner in 1967. This book chronicles their remarkable, romantic pairing in an era where a movie star's private life could remain hidden from a prying public. Spencer was married to a devoted Catholic, Louise, and he refused to divorce her. He also felt a tremendous sense of guilty about his deaf son. So marriage was out of the question, but Kate didn't care, she just wanted she be with Spencer, and she was, following him all over the world to sit worshipfully at his feet.

Andersen dutifully chronicles the nine classic Tracy-Hepburn films and gives some intriguing behind-the-scenes glimpses into each movie. There is also much information about Tracy's legendary bouts with the bottle, his brief fling with Gene Tierney in the early 50's and Kate's affair with Howard Hughes in the 1930's. All the bases are covered, but I wish Andersen would have interviewed more people close to the duo. Still, an engrossing read and essential for anyone enamored with either Spencer or Kate.

I wanted to like this book because it was supposed to be the personal rememberances of a close friend of the great Katharine Hepburn in her final days.

But this memoir disturbed me. Scott Berg mentioned briefly that he felt like the guy taking care of Norma Desmond and that's when it clicked. In these memoirs, Berg was recreating Sunset Boulevard and the sad, lonely, delusional decline of a fading film star who desperately misses her public in his retelling of the final years of Katharine Hepburn.

The way he described he took care of her made him look more important and big and it made Katharine Hepburn look more insignficant and small. She really looked like a sad, faded, deluded film star who misses her public by the end of the book and this wasn't a pleasant image. I'm not even sure whether it was an accurate one. Kate seemed to have more independence even in her final days.

He does seem to emphasize how he defends his 'Miss Hepburn' mostly against the editors of Esquire and then the smarmy Warren Beatty who wanted to use her for one of his films but to be honest, almost everyone in the book other than himself and Katharine Hepburn come out looking a little sleazy and that doesn't make for pleasant reading. (It also makes you question his accuracy.)

The result of the Norma Desmond comparisons and the lack of any really sympathetic character other than the author and Katharine Hepburn herself made for a slightly sleazy aftertaste and ultimately a supremely disappointing read.

Wonderful insights into the life of this fascinating woman! Highly recommended for anyone who is interested in the "Golden Age" of Hollywood.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this book.

As several people have already stated, the book is often more about Berg and his reaction to Hepburn, rather than a biography of Hepburn herself. It is often very touching and humorous in certain places, and is well-written enough to sustain interest.

However -- something just didn't feel right about the book. Berg was hardly the first or only person to interview her, so how exactly how did this relationship develop? I couldn't help feeling that Berg was exaggerating the extent of their friendship.

Additionally, I found his description of Kate's final years both depressing and exploitative. Berg seems to believe that he's describing her with respect and dignity, but I just found myself thinking - oh, sure, Hepburn would be THRILLED that all this would be in print. I certainly hope my "friend" would not write about my death that way.

All in all, this book contains interesting tidbits, but you can't help feeling that Berg is either a bit phony or opportunistic.

I had previously read The Making of the African Queen and Me, but Kate Remembered seemed to tie it all together. Actually, I picked up the book at Wal-Mart, on a table sale. Always having been a long-time fan, I grabbed the book and read it in 2 days. I think what comes through a lot, is not just Katharine Hepburn's life, but the relationshipt Scott Berg had with her, perhaps her only real confidante except for Spencer Tracy, and even then, perhaps not him, because she was there for him, not him for her. At any rate, it's a damn good read, and rather poignant at the end. I did shed a tear. Well worth the read.

No person in their right mind could write a biography of Kate and not be personally affected to this degree. The impact she had on Mr. Berg's life and vice versa showed through in even the most intimate of moments between them.

Anyone can find facts and anecdotes just about everywhere these days, but how often can such a personal glimpse offer the reader so much?

Kate came to life in this book. I saw her talking and felt her strong presense throughout. I was once again reminded of why I was such a fan. You can't help but fall a little bit in love with this woman and it shouldn't be a great surprise that even Mr. Berg was taken away by her presense, caring and passion. It shined in every passage.

The book Spencer Tracy: Tragic Idol is a great book. It is extremely informative as well. Bill Davidson spent years of interviewing to put together what is probably the best Spencer Tracy biography. This book gives detailed information on each and every film that Tracy ever made. Another reason that this is a great book are the parts about the strange yet touching romance Spencer Tracy had with Katherine Hepburn. Unlike some other bigraphies of Tracy, this one is extremely well balanced. It tells not only of Spencer Tracy's great acting skills, but also of the bad things in his private life. This book is a must read for all Spencer Tracy fans.

Davidson clearly embellished many of the interviews he claimed to have had with various people including Tracy himself. This book is extremely inaccurate and unnecessarily lurid. For more balanced books on Tracy read Tracy and Hepburn by Garson Kanin, the Tracy biography by Larry Swindell and the really good Spencer Tracy Bio-bibliography by James Fisher.

The book is not worth the money, also the book I received is old. I am not sure if they send me a wrong one or not. I returned the book.

2005 Edition if VERY Different from earlier editions -- reviews that pre-date 2005 are not talking about the current edition of this book--- More than half of the book was rewitten for the 2005 editon, and it now follows the Modeling Instruction in Physics curriculum more closely than any other current textbook. Note: Modeling Instruction in Physics was recognized in 2001 by the U.S. Department of Education as one of two exemplary programs in K-12 Science Education.

One of the worst examples of Physics text books. Explanations are poor. Very limited number of examples. And the examples are not clearly explained. By making it too simple the author has sacrificed rigor and has ended up confusing students. I would not recommend this text book as an introductory text book on physics to juniors and seniors in high school. I am yet to find a better book than Giancoli's for a non-calculus based introductory physics text book.

Quite possibly.
While I'm not nearly so far as some of these reviewers were when they reviewed the book, this physics book has pushed me so far beyond the reaches of my patience that I find no reason why I should not share with you how horribly this book fails to explain physics anyway.
In all my years of science classes, I have never come across a book this inept at conveying concepts. Generally my rule of thumb is, if you can look through a chapter, find the paragraph or so of information you need to answer a question or solve a problem, maybe an example problem to look at, then you've got a good book before you. This is not one such book.
Though the chapters are short, there is no conciseness or organization to the information within them. In order to learn a concept, you must trudge through three pages of very very very watered down information (who doesn't understand RISE over RUN equals SLOPE?). Normally, if a person gets impatient with the watered down stuff, they can skip to a box that has the equations, or a diagram with a caption underneath it. But I've discovered that this is impossible to do here. The text basically is the caption of all the wonderfully abundant diagrams and photographs provided AND the lesson material all in one.
And as for the diagrams, graphs, and other visuals, they seem to be poorly placed on the pages. Often times they are not labeled well enough to know what paragraph it is associated with, as if they were only afterwards slapped onto the page (which could explain why some of the explanations of these diagrams are downright cryptic).
There is no effectiveness to the method the author uses to explain concepts; there seems to be a meaningless abundance of explanation on how to draw diagrams, but when it comes down to the concepts, there's little to work with. If he was more succinct and organized, perhaps physics would make sense to many more students that have to work with this book.

Exactly. This is what the book looks like if you go to a store right now and open it. This book is virtually a math book although physics is about 60% math and 30% science information, this book is like 95% to 5%. Not only that the explainations for some of the problems are really bad. The reason why people think physics is hard is b/c of books like these that make it hard. THEIR are even mistakes in the formulas they use and they dont round numbers to significant digits. Im the top of my class in physics only b/c i like science, this book can change your mind real fast. The book does not explain who and how which is vital in learnig and passing any science test. For example Isaac Newton proposed the law of gravity. It just tells you concepts and terms that came from nowhere. The only good part about it is webassign that lets you practice problems online. d.

Well, it looks like I'm giving yet another one of my college textbooks a less than stellar review. This particular book was the required text for Chemistry 1010 at my college. Extremely expensive is how I feel about this book, since unlike my intro Psych book, which cost just as much, I find this one to be both confusing and patronizing. I had a slave driver for a Honors Chem teacher in high school, so I expected Chemistry to be easy, since I later found out that in high school I had taken the equivalent of a Chemistry class required of college level Chemistry majors. My professor was fairly good. He made it a point of explaining all the math and all the other mumbo-jumbo in this text. He had to do that a lot. Why, you ask? Because, this book, I swear, was written for a sixth grader. It comes across as such, especially in the first few chapters, where they talk about atoms and molarity, elements and compounds. It isn't until the later chapters, when you get to learn about things I still cannot even spell, that the author finally becomes serious. But still, the weird jokes about the neutron who went to the bar, the pictures of the author's wife and family members strewn about, and the corny cartoon characters trying to make Chemistry equations "fun" are just that-sappy and VERY corny. I had to repeatedly look at the cover of the book to make sure I was not reading a child's Chemistry text. And, come the day of the final, most of my classmates are more than willing to get rid of this text, which for most of us has served us well as a paperweight. I didn't even get to use it for that-my roommate is a Chemistry major and had an even bigger Chemistry book to use for that purpose. I spent $102 on this thing that masquerades as a college level Chemistry text, but in reality reads like it was meant for an uneducated 12 year old. The vast majority of us in this class did not use this book. We had a fairly decent professor whose lectures proved far more useful than this text, althought his tests were quite confusing. This book has no real purpose. Save your money and look for the copy on reserve at the library. It is better than being reminded that in the scope of the author, that you are not worthy of being treated like a college level adult because you did not take the intro Chemistry class aimed at Chem majors. This book is horrible, and the worst part is that I only got $45 back for it at textbook buyback this last week. Ugh.