Life Itself: Ebert Memoir Reaps Raves For Roger
Are we surprised?
NPR.org | Time Out Chicago | New York Times | The Atlantic
Reviews of Roger Ebert’s memoir, Life Itself, are pouring in — Maureen Dowd’s was just posted — and the critics love it. “The book charms and entertains, but it also teaches,” Spencer Kornhaber writes in the Atlantic. Robert Feder, who worked with Ebert at the Sun-Times for decades, says his ex-colleague wrote a “warm, funny, insightful and thoroughly engaging” book. Ebert tweeted earlier today that “my book gets a dream review from Janet Maslin in the New York Times.”
Read an excerpt at Salon:
I do not fear death
I will pass away sooner than most people who read this, but that doesn’t shake my sense of wonder and joyI know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.
Buy 4 Responses to “Life Itself: Ebert Memoir Reaps Raves For Roger”
I’ve always enjoyed his movie reviews, but over the years I’ve found his writings much more engaging, more philosophical–perhaps it’s just age and relevance that he speaks to events in my life.
I have his book on my Amazon Wish List. It looks like one of those pearls that are very much worth the effort.
I just bought the book and read the first chapter (Kindle edition, of course.) I can already tell this is one of those books that makes you regret that you took that speed reading course. One of those books where the use of the language is a joy in itself, where the desire to discover it is in conflict with the need to savor every word.
I guess we have turned a corner when we are no longer surprised to learn that a man or woman of obvious intelligence is an atheist. The only remaining corner to be turned in the United States will be when we start being surprised to learn that a person of obvious intelligence is still a believer in the supernatural. I suppose we are at that point in the scientific community.
I have lived and worked in four countries in my adult life. In the United States people are shocked to learned that you are an atheist, a little more shocked than they would be to learn you have a fatal, communicable disease. In Germany people expected you to be an atheist. In China they were relieved to find out you are an atheist. And in Canada they were too polite to consider it a fit subject for discussion.
“And in Canada they were too polite to consider it a fit subject for discussion.”
This made me smile, Merkin — because it’s soooo true. Proselytizing, in this country, makes others so very uncomfortable. We discuss intimate sexual details with more ease than details about one’s personal religion or relationship to the God of one’s choice. Yet we are ‘cousins’ of the Yanks — it truly is strange, this huge difference in our spiritual outlooks.
And up further, in another comment, you write “One of those books where the use of the language is a joy in itself, where the desire to discover it is in conflict with the need to savor every word.” Beautifully put — I felt that way with every Saul Bellow book I picked up. And Thomas Wolfe too.
Am gonna read Mr. Ebert’s memoir — but I’ll get the dead tree version. Mostly because I love the smell of a new book, freshly cracked. Kindle just can’t offer that.