Book Review: “At Home With Kate” by Eileen Considine-Meara

“At Home With Kate: Growing Up in Katharine Hepburn’s Household: An Intimate Portrait” is a bit of a highfalutin title for this humble volume. The book is written by the daughter of Katharine Hepburn’s cook/housekeeper at the NYC residence, so the author did not actually “grow up” in Katharine Hepburn’s household. That’s not to say she didn’t accumulate a number of interesting anecdotes about the star, but let’s just try and keep things in perspective.

In the early 1930s, after Hepburn had made her initial splash out in Hollywood, she and her husband Luddy moved into 244 East 49th Street, a brownstone in the Turtle Bay area of New York City. They rented the house furnished for $100 a month, and in 1937 Hepburn purchased the house for $27,500. 244 would be Hepburn’s New York headquarters for the rest of the 20th century.

17 WOMEN WHO SHOOK THE WORLD by Preethi Burkholder

I am always interested in a book profiling strong women from history. There is something so desirably important about remembering, and reminding others, that women were active participants in every stage of history since the dawn of time. Not only did women participate in world events, they were instrumental in constructing what we now call our shared history. There was never an era in our past when women were not present, be it in government, business, or religion. The roles of women in relation to men have changed significantly over time, but women were never absent from the goings on of the world.

Preethi Burkholder is a Sri Lanka-born graduate of Tufts university. She has devoted her entrepreneurial skills to improving the lot of women in her home country and abroad. In 2006 she started a website called Gifted Hands Writing where she gives advice about writing and student financial aid. To be honest, I was not impressed with the website. It looks a bit janky and is hard to navigate. The number of tabs at the top is overwhelming, making it difficult to discover what it is that Burkholder actually does.

“Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard” by Ben Crystal

Shakespeare on Toast was published by Icon Books on September 11, 2012. Ben Crystal is an English actor/author who has been interviewed by many news agencies about his work with Shakespeare. His previous publications include two books co-authored by his father David Crystal: Shakespeare’s Words (Penguin, 2002) and The Shakespeare Miscellany (Penguin, 2005).

In 2009 I went on a Shakespeare’s England Abroad with a group of students from my college. Really I just wanted to go to England, and I was an English major, so it seemed like the thing to do. I guess because I always liked reading and stuff, I never hated Shakespeare like most people. However, I can definitely understand how some people are turned off by the holier-than-thou aura that surrounds the genius playwright.

Good Reads for December

December is a month for being with family, eating disgusting amounts of delicious food, and curling up on front of the fire with a good book and an eggnog latte. I recently joined a number of groups on Goodreads.com and tomorrow I am going to the library to pick up the books on my reading list for this month.

For the Books2Movies Club, which focuses on books that have been made into films, I will be reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. The book is made up of the diaries and letters of a depressed high-schooler. It sounds a bit like the classic Adrian Mole series I used to read, so I am rather looking forward to it. Another member of the group said that she loved the book so much she couldn’t put it down. Let’s hope I experience the same sensation!