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Life Itself
- A Memoir
- Narrated by: Edward Herrmann
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
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Publisher's summary
"I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out."
—from Life Itself
Roger Ebert is the best-known film critic of our time. He has been reviewing films for the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967, and was the first film critic ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. He has appeared on television for four decades, including 23 years as cohost of Siskel & Ebert at the Movies.
In 2006, complications from thyroid cancer treatment resulted in the loss of his ability to eat, drink, or speak. But with the loss of his voice, Ebert has only become a more prolific and influential writer. And now, for the first time, he tells the full, dramatic story of his life and career.
Roger Ebert's journalism carried him on a path far from his nearly idyllic childhood in Urbana, Illinois. It is a journey that began as a reporter for his local daily, and took him to Chicago, where he was unexpectedly given the job of film critic for the Sun-Times, launching a lifetime's adventures.
In this candid, personal history, Ebert chronicles it all: his loves, losses, and obsessions; his struggle and recovery from alcoholism; his marriage; his politics; and his spiritual beliefs. He writes about his years at the Sun-Times, his colorful newspaper friends, and his life-changing collaboration with Gene Siskel. He remembers his friendships with Studs Terkel, Mike Royko, Oprah Winfrey, and Russ Meyer (for whom he wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and an ill-fated Sex Pistols movie). He shares his insights into movie stars and directors like John Wayne, Werner Herzog, and Martin Scorsese.
This is a story that only Roger Ebert could tell. Filled with the same deep insight, dry wit, and sharp observations that his readers have long cherished, this is more than a memoir-it is a singular, warm-hearted, inspiring look at life itself.
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Portrait of a Marriage--Before Gay Liberation
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By: Alan Shayne, and others
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Fairyland
- A Memoir of My Father
- By: Alysia Abbott
- Narrated by: Alysia Abbott
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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A beautiful, vibrant memoir about growing up motherless in 1970s and 80s San Francisco with an openly gay father. After his wife dies in a car accident, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. There they discover a city in the midst of revolution, bustling with gay men in search of liberation - few of whom are raising a child. Steve throws himself into San Francisco's vibrant cultural scene.
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Great representation of the time
- By AvidReader22 on 06-07-19
By: Alysia Abbott
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The Night Ocean
- By: Paul La Farge
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Marina Willett, MD, has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends - or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears.
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Frustratingly Uneven Due to Clumsy Plot Structure
- By Adam on 06-15-17
By: Paul La Farge
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There Are Worse Things I Could Do
- By: Adrienne Barbeau
- Narrated by: Adrienne Barbeau
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Adrienne Barbeau never set out to be a sex symbol, and she never planned on giving birth to twins when she was 51, but both those stories and a lot more are detailed in this witty, revealing memoir. With humor and fearlessness, she shares her romance with a superstar, her marriage to a famous film director, her marriage to a much younger man and her successful battle with infertility.
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Excellent book
- By Jill on 01-05-10
By: Adrienne Barbeau
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Liner Notes
- On Parents & Children, Exes & Excess, Death & Decay, & a Few of My Other Favorite Things
- By: Loudon Wainwright III
- Narrated by: Loudon Wainwright III
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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A memoir by the influential Grammy Award-winning singer and actor - son of journalist Loudon Wainwright, former husband of Kate McGarrigle and Suzzy Roche, and father of Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright, Lucy Wainwright Roche, and Lexie Kelly Wainwright - a captivating meditation on relationships and creativity from the patriarch of one of America's great musical families. With a career spanning more than four decades, Loudon Wainwright III has established himself as one of the most enduring singer-songwriters who emerged from the late '60s.
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Best ever book for listening
- By Jeff Bernhardt on 10-29-17
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She Made Me Laugh
- My Friend Nora Ephron
- By: Richard Cohen
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Award-winning journalist Richard Cohen, wrote this about his "third-person memoir": "I call this book a third-person memoir. It is about my closest friend, Nora Ephron, and the lives we lived together and how her life got to be bigger until, finally, she wrote her last work, the play, Lucky Guy, about a newspaper columnist dying of cancer while she herself was dying of cancer. I have interviewed many of her other friends - Mike Nichols, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, Arianna Huffington.
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Loved it!
- By Leigh Lerro on 10-27-17
By: Richard Cohen
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A Fine Romance
- By: Candice Bergen
- Narrated by: Candice Bergen
- Length: 14 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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A Fine Romance begins with Bergen's charming first husband, French director Louis Malle, whose huge appetite for life broadened her horizons and whose occasional darkness never diminished their love for each other. But her real romance begins when she discovers overpowering love for her daughter after years of ambivalence about motherhood.
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up the speed to 1.5 and Candace sounds way better
- By Susan M. Mitchell on 06-03-15
By: Candice Bergen
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Sunny's Nights
- Lost and Found at the Bar at the End of the World
- By: Tim Sultan
- Narrated by: Robert Malloch
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Imagine that Alice had walked into a bar instead of falling down the rabbit hole. In the tradition of J. R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar and the classic reportage of Joseph Mitchell, here is an indelible portrait of what is quite possibly the greatest bar in the world—and the mercurial, magnificent man behind it. The first time he saw Sunny’s Bar, in 1995, Tim Sultan was lost, thirsty for a drink, and intrigued by the single bar sign among the forlorn warehouses lining the Brooklyn waterfront.
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Visiting an Era
- By Carolyn on 03-01-16
By: Tim Sultan
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Reading My Father
- A Memoir
- By: Alexandra Styron
- Narrated by: Alexandra Styron
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Alexandra Styron's parents—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written with humor, compassion, and grace.
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William Styron Ranks...
- By Douglas on 12-22-13
By: Alexandra Styron
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The Unspeakable
- And Other Subjects of Discussion
- By: Meghan Daum
- Narrated by: Meghan Daum
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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It's a report tempered by hard times. In "Matricide", Daum unflinchingly describes a parent's death and the uncomfortable emotions it provokes; and in "Diary of a Coma" she relates her own journey to the twilight of the mind. But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the marriage-industrial complex, of the New Age dating market, and of the peculiar habits of the young and digital.
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Complaining about her dead mom.
- By Erik Hermansen on 11-23-14
By: Meghan Daum
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What's So Funny?
- My Hilarious Life
- By: Tim Conway, Jane Scovell, Carol Burnett - foreword
- Narrated by: Tim Conway, Carol Burnett, Dick Hill, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Six-time Emmy Award-winning funnyman Tim Conway, best known for his characters on The Carol Burnett Show, offers a straight-shooting and hilarious memoir about his life on stage and off as an actor and comedian. In television history, few entertainers have captured as many hearts and made as many people laugh as Tim Conway. There's nothing in the world that Tim Conway would rather do than entertain - and in his first-ever memoir, What's So Funny?, that's exactly what he does.
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Not narrated by Tim
- By Bob Murdock on 05-05-14
By: Tim Conway, and others
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His Ownself
- A Semi-Memoir
- By: Dan Jenkins
- Narrated by: Henry Strozier
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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The colorful, sentimental, funny, affectionate, cantankerous memoir by the most colorful, funniest, most cantankerous-- and probably the most revered-- sportswriter of the last fifty years. Dan Jenkins is accepted as one of the greatest (if not the greatest) golf writer of all time, wrote beloved bestselling novels and abused more corporate expense accounts than anyone who ever lived. It's a touching, laugh-out-loud tribute to the romanticism of old-time sportswriting-- and the glory days of sports.
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Loved this book!
- By Flannery Abrahamson on 05-23-19
By: Dan Jenkins
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Beer Money
- A Memoir of Privilege and Loss
- By: Frances Stroh
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Frances Stroh's earliest memories are ones of great privilege: shopping trips to London and New York, lunches served by black-tied waiters at the Regency Hotel, and a house filled with precious antiques, which she was forbidden to touch. Established in Detroit in 1850, by 1984 the Stroh Brewing Company had become the largest private beer fortune in America and a brand emblematic of the American dream itself; while Stroh was coming of age, the Stroh family fortune was estimated to be worth $700 million.
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Beer boring
- By Richard E. Putt Jr. on 05-22-16
By: Frances Stroh
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What listeners say about Life Itself
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- dj
- 06-14-13
An Owner's Manual for Living a Fulfilled Life
Roger Ebert might just have been the happiest man alive – I know that’s not true, but it may be close. He’s either the greatest liar or luckiest man who ever lived; I believe the later.
He shares with us his life – though he doesn’t pat himself on the back for doing some of it right or wallow in misery for the things he did wrong (particularly alcoholism) – he really does celebrate all of it in these pages. I sincerely thank him for that.
This is a book that clearly demonstrates that it’s the little things in a life that make it grand – he spends more time telling us about his inability to rid himself of a single one of the books he’s owned in his life than he does aggrandizing the life of the most celebrated movie critic ever.
He shares the love he had for the people in his life – the newspaper friends, his parents, and his beloved wife. He shares the joy he felt in revisiting the little places he had found and loved in cities around the world. He shares the wonder found in books, movies, and life in general.
This really is a book that makes me want to be a better person – and one that shows me the way to go about it. I can’t recommend it more enthusiastically. Listen to it twice.
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- Jojobean
- 05-18-20
Not what I had in mind..
This is a memoir of his life that takes you back into the 60's, which is difficult for me to relate with. I was looking for more movie review related stories but this was not that sort of book.. my bad.
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- danny lawrence
- 12-08-12
One and a half thumbs up
This wasnt an incredibly in depth memoir but some of the Hollywood Elite stories made this a mostly fun and entertaining listen. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and others kept it interesting. Edward Herrman did a fantastic job with the narration. A light take on the life and career of one of the most famous movie critics in american media history.
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- Bob
- 11-17-12
this book demonstrates the key role of the reader
Would you consider the audio edition of Life Itself to be better than the print version?
Absolutely. I am sure if I had read the book,the long lists of names and places would have been cumbersome. What brought this book to live esd Edward Herrmann's pitch-perfect reading.
What did you like best about this story?
I enjoyed the stories and reference to movies and Ebert's positive attitude, but was carried me away into the story was Edward Herrmann. It was both calm and restrained and yet full of warmth and emotion.
What does Edward Herrmann bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Uh, everything. Intelligence, feeling, drama - this dude is one of the great readers
Any additional comments?
did I mention how impressive Edward Herrmann was?
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7 people found this helpful
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- MG
- 02-04-12
Enjoyable autobiography
What did you love best about Life Itself?
Some people earn the right to tell their story, and Roger Ebert certainly has. He does not brag or name drop; he remains in awe of his circumstance. He tells intersting and funny stories about the movie industry and theh people he grew close to.
What did you like best about this story?
Roger is down to earth. He reveals himself in an honest way.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Don
- 12-25-12
Surprisingly good read
What did you love best about Life Itself?
I found the book really brought me into his world and the times he grew up in. It was really great to listen to all the stories behind the movies, actors, and directors. If you are a movie buff, you'll like this aspect of the book.I also liked that he never pulled any punches. He tells it, warts and all.
What does Edward Herrmann bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
I found the narrator was just about perfect. His tone and cadence were bang on, and did not distract in any way.
Any additional comments?
It gave me a better understanding of the life of one of my favorite tv personalities. I also appreciate that even without the ability to speak, he is still connecting with his fan base in a great way.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Bill at Torg Stories
- 04-25-13
The Newspaper Business in Chicago
I mentally noted chapter 13 for when I began to get really interested in this book. Once I got past childhood and into Roger getting his first job, this really picked up for me. Given Roger's lifetime of watching movies, it was interesting to hear his opinions on film and about all the experiences he's had talking with filmmakers and actors. Lots of excellent travel stories related to film festivals.
Oh yeah! Getting started in TV was also a great story. Roger's wife Chaz is an inspiration. What an amazing woman.
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- Merci Cherie
- 05-22-24
Raconteur = Roger Ebert
This is a great memoir! I love Roger's honesty and his great recall. He may have forgotten a name here and there but his recall of words and stories from his past is an immense joy to listen to! He doesn't hold grudges or lack feelings in his telling of stories about this person or that person. His granduer life was simple and was filled with joy of life. His wife, Gene Siskel, Martin Scorese, Lee Marvin, John Wayne, Woody Allen and Studs Terkel (and etc) are written with love, compassion and profound humanity that it makes my heart swell with so much tenderness for this people that I now seek to purchase this book so that I can look up these movies and books to see for myself. And they found a great orator to read the recounting of his life, you forget that this isn't his voice.
Two Thumbs Up!!
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- Pohokano
- 06-30-19
A wonderful memoir beautifully told
A lovely telling of Ebert's life well lived. He made the most of his time, even after cancer took its toll. I knew of him only as the nerdy guy on the movie–review shows (Siskel was much more interesting) but now appreciate all that was behind the figure on the screen. I wish I could have known him.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- K
- 12-06-14
My favorite audio book of all time!
What did you love best about Life Itself?
Edward Herrman's narration.
Who was your favorite character and why?
Roger Ebert's stories are charming.
Any additional comments?
Since the stories are non-linear, I am never bored by this book. I find the narration and story cadence to be soothing, I have listed to this three times already!
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