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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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- 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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- Kevin - Portland OR
- 11-12-20
newspaper life and movies. a fascinating book.
although Roger didn't/couldn't read his story, the sound of his voice animates this entire book. It was funny and moving and bittersweet. one of my favorite Audible offerings to date. Edward Herrmann's reading was pitch perfect.
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- Kindle Customer
- 04-08-21
Great Words and Stories
Loved this, the only thing I felt that dragged were the stories of celebrities, I felt like it was padding, however when it got back to Ebert’s life, that was absolutely perfect! Great read
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- C92128I
- 07-14-17
Beautifully written and narrated
I'm so glad to have read this memoir by Roger Ebert. The narrator was excellent. As much as I was aware of Ebert there's so much to discover in a life's work of this magnitude. It was interesting and captivating. He is missed! Enjoy the listen!
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- loix
- 09-18-11
mixed feelings
What did you love best about Life Itself?
Roger's rich life, straight from the horse's mouth.
What did you like best about this story?
Mr. Ebert's power of recall was a little frightening, but I certainly admire it, and the prose is just beautifully precise.
What about Edward Herrmann’s performance did you like?
I was almost inspired to listen to the Cheney memoir. The narration was spot on throughout, down to the different accents. I could even sense the slightest tinge of feeling in some of the more emotional passages.
If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?
It ain't over till you stop living it.
Any additional comments?
Maybe I'm reaching for the moon here, but that's only because the author has already set the bar so high with his other writings. I am aware that redundancy is inherent in vignette-style memoirs such as this one, but I would have much preferred those repeats replaced with more anecdotes about the walks through his favorite haunts, great directors /actors, and movie/book references.
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23 people found this helpful
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- Scott T. Hards
- 04-02-12
Fast Forward to Chapter 20
If you're a fan of Roger Ebert -- and I most certainly am one -- you may wish to start your reading of this book at chapter 20. All the previous essays (that's how this book is structured; not as a timeline narrative of his life, but a collection of essays on topics from his life) focus on his family life and youth, and offer nothing of much relevance to understanding Roger the man, or why he became such a great critic. I found it a chore to power through and get to the far meatier second half. Of course, if information about his relatives' cooking skills, or that people he lived with in South Africa had a cute dog and other such personal minutiae are your thing, then by all means dive in.
The task is made easier by Edward Herrmann, the narrator, who is simply superb; probably some of the best work I've enjoyed on Audible outside of Simon Vance's accomplishments.
Even in the second half of the book, I was left wanting for more. We learn that Roger never desired to be a movie critic, that the job was just handed to him. But he offers no insight into how he thought and worked to turn himself into one of America's finest despite having no initial lust for the task. His discussion of Gene Siskel, too, is unfortunately shallow despite that partner being perhaps the one human being we most closely associate with Roger.
We do get entertaining chapters about his associations with several different Hollywood stars, e.g., John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and more, but this is basically classy gossip, and reveals nothing about Roger Ebert, except that he's met some famous people.
Perhaps the most revealing and touching sections were the two poignant chapters about his wife, Chaz, who was a complete enigma to me prior to reading this.
So Roger, please go back and tell us what it was like to be a movie critic!
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11 people found this helpful
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- Linda
- 03-03-13
Surprisingly funny, poignant and beautiful.
If you could sum up Life Itself in three words, what would they be?
A must read.
What was one of the most memorable moments of Life Itself?
I cannot pull one thing out. It was all memorable. Roger Ebert expresses so many emotions that I believe we all feel, but cannot speak of. The humility and tenderness of his self observation, his downfalls, his successes, all revealed to me a man I really didn't know anything about, though I watched him on TV for years. He is so much more than a movie critic. And he has found peace and joy even in his tragedies. I recommend this highly to everyone, as I can not imagine a person who would not be moved.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
Oh, there were so many. I'm going to listen again.
Any additional comments?
Roger Ebert is truly a bright star of a person, one so needed in this world today.
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- Pep Streebeck
- 12-25-20
Fascinating look into the interior life of one of the greatest film critics of all time
Roger Ebert’s memoir goes into some harrowing, magical and surprising places — not unlike life itself. The one criticism is there’s not nearly enough talk about his time working with Gene Siskel whom he worked with 24 years (nearly half his life). He gives a few solid chapters to him but it’s slightly frustrating as he had a great connection to him that not many others would be able to talk about. Either way, it’s a terrific book.
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- TimH
- 07-19-13
Ebert is best enjoyed when he writes about others
What would have made Life Itself better?
Less detail! Pages and pages and pages were spent on the tiniest details that I had absolutely no interest in. I have been a fan of Ebert's for years, but in this work he seems endlessly enamored of his own ability to recall facts from his past, giving no thought to whether anyone will care.
Would you ever listen to anything by Roger Ebert again?
I have always enjoyed Ebert's writing, but I know now to avoid pieces he writes about himself.
Did Edward Herrmann do a good job differentiating all the characters? How?
Edward Herrmann's voice began to take on a tone of superiority and self-importance, but I suspect that was due to the words he was reading.
If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Life Itself?
The chapters about his experiences with notable people in the film industry can stay just as they are. All the material about his childhood could be compressed into 50% of the space, and half of the minutia about his adult life could be cut away with no detriment to the work as a whole.
Any additional comments?
I cannot recommend this book. But I still think of Ebert as a talented movie critic whose writings on film I always enjoy.
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- Brad Dye
- 11-28-22
Not the Audiobook You’re Wanting
Let’s start out with positives: the narrator is fantastic and Roger Ebert (RIP) is a talented writer that can make anything interesting… and that’s where the positives end.
If you were looking for a book that details the life of reviewing movies this is not it. The review show Siskel & Ebert is rarely talked about but he does spend an entire chapter talking about Stake N Shake. It’s like if JK Rowling wrote an autobiography and the only mention of Harry Potter is her saying, “and that’s when I wrote Harry Potter” Unfortunately, I was unable to find any other audio books by Roger Ebert or Gene Siskel on audible. So I would recommend just sticking with watching poor quality re-uploads of their reviews on YouTube as a podcast.
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- Jennifer
- 10-21-11
I wanted to like it more
I really respect Mr. Ebert and consider him hugely talented as a film critic and as a writer, but overall, I didn't enjoy this book as much as I thought I would. It was too heavy on nostalgia and minutia, and as a previous reviewer noted there were many repetitions of portions of anecdotes and stories. I will say this, Mr. Ebert's ability to face his challenges and his own mortality with humor, strength, and optimism is very impressive--I just thought that the memoir was overall too sentimental for my tastes. The vocal performace is wonderful, though.
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10 people found this helpful