Are we surprised?
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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.