WGBH News: Books

New In Paperback: Sept. 12 - 18, 2011

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 22:10:00 GMT

Susan G. Komen Founder Discusses Her Book

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 19:00:00 GMT

Michael Moore On His Penchant For 'Trouble'

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:00:00 GMT

Michael Moore didn't plan on becoming a filmmaker. As a teenager growing up in the Midwest, he considered documentaries to be a bit like broccoli: good for you, but boring.

Instead, he spent his adolescent and young adult years rabble-rousing. He was elected to the school board when he was a senior in high school, became a young supporter of Richard Nixon and even flirted with the idea of becoming a Catholic priest.

But once Moore got around to finally making his first film, he stumbled upon a new kind of documentary: confrontational, comedic and provocatively political. Roger & Me, about the decline of Moore's hometown, Flint, Mich., was the public's first glimpse of the documentarian's often brash interview style.

Moore talks with NPR's Neal Conan about his new memoir, Here Comes Trouble: Stories From My Life, why he bristles at being called controversial and how he feels about the current partisan mood in the United States.

Interview Highlights

On when he committed himself to standing up against injustice

"When you think back to those pivotal moments ... you're trying to figure out, 'How did I get here?' and sometimes they aren't big things that happen in your life. Sometimes they're very small events.

"And I had just been elected to the school board, but I still had a week left of school. So I was both a student and the boss — or one of the bosses — of the vice principal. We're standing there in line, getting ready to go up to the graduation ceremony, and he's coming down the line making sure each of the boys have a tie on underneath their gown.

"The boy in front of me, [the vice principal] pulls his gown down and he sees a tie, but its one of those bolo ties ... And he yanks him out of the line and he says, 'You don't have a proper tie on, and you're not graduating.'

"'But sir, this is a tie, this is what we wear.'

"And he yanks him out and he literally takes him out the door. And ... his parents are sitting up there in the stands — go through the whole graduation — their son never comes out. Later they find him curled up in the back seat of their car crying, because he didn't get to graduate.

"But what bothered me really, wasn't so much what the vice principal did. It's that I was standing right behind this kid and I said nothing. I didn't want to cause any trouble. It was my graduation night; I didn't want to get thrown out. And so I stood there in silence. And his mother called me the next day and said, 'What can you do?' And I said, 'Well we can't re-run the graduation.'

"'Well, did you see it happen?'

"'Yes.'

"'Well, what did you do?'

"'Um, nothing.'

"And this just — this just did a number on my own conscience. And I just thought, I will never be silent again. And I stood there and said nothing. And I just resolved at that moment, at 18 years old, that I will not stand silently by when I see some injustice taking place, even if it is the smallest thing ... And so I was kind of a different person from that moment on."

On why he dislikes being called controversial

"I started my own newspaper when I was 22, 23 years old. And it was an alternative newspaper, and I edited and wrote for that paper for almost a decade. And that was kind of my early background before Roger & Me, in terms of investigate reporting and writing about what was going on, especially with General Motors.

"I was writing back in the '70s that something's wrong with this company. This can't sustain itself if they keep behaving this way. If you keep laying people off who buy the cars, who's gonna buy the cars? And when you lay them off, they don't just stop buying cars. They stop buying washing machines and clock radios and things like that ... I wasn't an economist, but it just made sense to me that moving these jobs to Mexico and other places was going to totally decimate our economy here.

"I wrote about this back in the '70s. And of course, back then GM was the No. 1 company in the world. A lot of people in Flint thought I was nuts — 'GM is never going to leave Flint, this is the best we could ever hope for and its wonderful and nothing's going to change.' And I just kept warning about this ...

"I get called controversial all the time ... What's so controversial about just trying to warn people that this company — the way they're being run — it's not good? And it's going to hurt everybody and everything eventually. That seems like a community service to me. I don't know, maybe I don't have a good view of myself ... I never think I'm controversial. If I stand on the Oscar stage and I say, 'Hey folks, they're not gong to find any weapons of mass destruction; we're not being told the truth' and etcetera, etcetera; what's so controversial about that? It's just the truth."

On partisanship in America

"I firmly believe that ... where we need to come together as a country is to realize that we all have more in common than not. If we got out a piece of paper ... draw a line down the center — agree, disagree — the list of what we agree on, I am certain, is much longer than the things we don't agree on.

"I'm going to guess Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, all want clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. I'm sure most people think women should be paid the same as men if they're doing the same job. I think we all want good schools for our kids. If we made that list, we actually are in agreement on more things.

"The things we don't agree on — if I don't want to own a gun, I won't own one; if you want to buy a gun, buy a gun. If you don't want to marry a man, and you're a man, for God's sake, don't marry a man! You'll hate it! But if other people want to do that, what's it to you?

"And I think we've got to come to just a place of agreeing to disagree on some things. Let's have the big debate on them, some will win, some will lose. But listen: we are all Americans, we are all in the same boat and we are going to sink or swim together. And my friends, we are sinking right now. And if we don't put aside some of this, and figure out a way to get together to fix some of these problems, we are in deep, deep trouble." [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Your Mind Cannot Handle the Arrant Awesomeness Of This Comic Book Cover

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 16:30:00 GMT

... so we're showing you just this tiny detail from it first.

Look at it for a while.

Take it in.

We'll reveal the cover in its full splendor after the jump, once your body's had some time to adjust. We don't want you to get the cool-bends, after all, wherein tiny bubbles of coolness work their way into your joints to cause tremendous pain. We're miles away from a hyperbaric chamber.

Thus: Caution shall be our watchword.

While we're waiting, here's some details about the comic book in question.

Rest assured you've got plenty of time to mentally and physically prepare yourself — the book won't be published until right around New Year's.

It's the first issue of a 4-book miniseries.

It's one of two covers. The above detail is from from the one by artist Dan Parent, who also did the book's interior art. That's the main cover — the one that will end up delivering its bolus of awesomeness to grocery stores, newsstands and the few remaining big-box bookstores that are still around. The variant cover, by Francesco Francavilla, will be harder to find — you'll have to hit comic book shops. We'll show you that one, too.

Okay. How you feeling? Good? Hale? Hearty?

Then take a deep breath.

BOOM.

Feast your eyes! Look upon't!

So many questions!

First of all: This is the classic KISS line-up, then? No Eric "The Fox" Carr or Vinnie "The Wiz" Vincent? ... Very well. I'll allow it.

Jughead as Ace "The Spaceman" Frehley? Sure. Yes. I can see that.

But really, Veronica as Paul "The Starchild" Stanley? Because ruthless Veronica Lodge, who could buy Pop's Choklit Shoppe with her pin money to turn it cold storage for her furs, is such a starry-eyed romantic? I think NOT.

Betty ... BETTY! ... as Peter "The Catman" Criss? Because she, like Criss, came to think of herself as having nine lives, having grown up on the mean streets of ... Riverdale Rock City? The very idea!

Finally we come to Archie. Archie Andrews. America's favorite tic-tac-toe-headed ginger. Swapping his Riverdale High letterman's jacket for greaves, dragon boots and a codpiece (not, mercifully, pictured) to lead Miss Grundy's class into the very mouth of Hell as Gene "The Demon" Simmons?

Yes, I know: Archie's the frontman. I get that. But the characterization's all wrong.

Because if Archie is Gene Simmons .... what of Reggie?

HUNH? WHAT OF REGGIE? ANSWER ME THAT.

(There he is, in the upper left, near the logo. The resolution's not quite good enough to see whose makeup he's wearing, but my money's on Reggie vying w/Archie for the Gene Simmons role and, with it, the right to: spit yogurt-and-food-coloring "blood"; star in a soul-eating reality show; and get hilariously schooled by public radio talk show hosts.)

Speaking of Blood....

KISS has spent much of its rock lifespan comics-adjacent. They've made cameo appearances in several Marvel titles ever the years, including Howard the Duck, and had their own Image, Dark Horse and "KISS Comics Group" series. Back in 1977, in fact, Marvel produced a KISS Super Special comic drawn by the great Steve Gerber that was notable for ...

Well, why not let the notary public who was on hand explain?

This is to certify that KISS members Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley, Paul Stanley and Peter Criss, have each donated blood which is being collectively mixed with red ink to be used for the first cover of the Marvel/KISS comics. The blood was extracted at February 21st, 1977 at Nassau Coliseum and has been under guarded refrigeration until this day until it was delivered to the Borden Ink plant in Depew, New York.

There you go. Imagine the sign topping comics spinner-racks in 7-11s across the country 34 years ago: "HEY KIDS! IT'S LIKE HOMEOPATHY! BUT CREEPY!"

Questions for discussion: A band that terrified suburban parents more than 30 years ago is now appearing in the country's most popular all-ages comic. What does this say:

1) About said band?

2) About said comic?

3) About who, exactly, said comic's target audience might be?

As you break into response groups, here's the variant cover, as promised:

Things to love: The blood-drippy Archie logo, the look of Lovecraftian disquiet on Archie's face.

Things to not-love: Nothing on the variant equals the original cover's deft placement of the iconic Archie pound-sign amid the red rockin' riot of Andrews/Simmons' Demon-wig. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

How To Help Your Child's Brain Grow Up Strong

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 16:02:00 GMT

Babies may look helpless but as soon as they come into the world, they're able to do a number of important things. They can recognize faces and moving objects. They're attracted to language. And from very early on, they can differentiate their mother from other humans.

"They really come equipped to learn about the world in a way that wasn't appreciated until recently," says neuroscientist Dr. Sandra Aamodt. "It look scientists a long time to realize that their brains are doing some very complicated things."

Aamodt and fellow neuroscientist Sam Wang explain how the human brain develops from infancy to adolescence in their new book Welcome to Your Child's Brain. The two researchers also offer tips for parents to help their children eat their spinach, learn their ABCs and navigate elementary school.

Before all of those things, however, children have to learn how to talk. Babies can differentiate syllables and new sounds from very early on, but there are ways for parents to help their children develop their language skills faster and more efficiently.

"The most simple way is to talk to your baby and around your baby a lot," says Aamodt. "And the other thing that parents can do is to respond when the baby speaks, even if the baby isn't forming the words correctly or you don't understand it. Just act like some communication has occurred — smile and give the baby a little pat — and that encourages the baby to continue to try to communicate."

But because language is so social, says Wang, passive exposure to words really doesn't help babies learn in any way.

"For instance, videos that are often shown to babies containing language are not nearly so effective," he says. "In some cases, people try to teach babies language by showing them videos in a foreign language. It doesn't work very well at all because these are not social ways of exposing a child to language."

Parents should also realize that their children may reach certain intellectual milestones at different times — and that's okay.

"Language is acquired quite well before the age of 6 but trying to force your children to read before the age of 4 is an effort that doesn't work very well because the brain is not very well-equipped to tell the letter 'b' from the letter 'd' and so on," says Wang. "[But] it's something that older children can do without any effort at all."

And children who grow up in bilingual households have a distinct advantage over their peers.

"Kids who learn two languages young are better able to learn abstract rules and to reverse rules that they've already learned," says Aamodt. "They're less likely to have difficulty choosing between conflicting possibilities when there are two possible responses that both present themselves. They're also better at figuring out what other people are thinking, which is probably because they have to figure out which language to use every time they talk to somebody in order to communicate."

Teaching Self-Control

Aamodt and Wang also emphasize the importance of teaching your children self-control from an early age.

"This is really critical because there are so many things parents want to do when they read parenting books," he says. "They take steps to teach their children math or reading ... but a big thing we can do for our children is to do the best to foster the development of self-control and willpower. Self-control and the ability to restrain impulses is associated with success at every age, whether it means being able to read at age 4 or being able to restrain impulses at a later age or even what your peers think of you in high school. At all of these ages, willpower and self-control is a strong predictor of academic success than IQ."

When children are young, they can learn self-control by focusing on any fun activity — whether that means studying martial arts or playing with dolls and planning a make-believe tea party.

"It gives the child practice at planning and organizing a series of topics to achieve a desired goal," says Aamodt. "When you're planning a tea party, you can't be acting like a fighter pilot. You have to be acting like a lady having a tea party. So pretending is one of the earliest types of exposure most kids get to planning and organizing their actions. And the more you practice that, the better you're going to be at it."

Making sure your child has fun while learning self-control is vitally important. Aamodt and Wang recommend, for instance, telling your child to pretend he or she is protecting a castle instead of just saying 'Stand still.'

"Taking advantage of a child's natural sense of fun is a terrific way to instill these things," says Wang. "This is not the kind of thing that works well if it's forced. It can be something as easy as pretending to guard the castle or playing a take-turns game where you say 'I'm going to draw an ear on this piece of paper and when you see an ear, then it's your time to listen and if you see a mouth on this other piece of paper, then it's your time to talk.' So all of these things can be done in very simple ways — in ways that are often fun — and the more fun it is, the more likely the child is to pay attention for a longer period of time. These things are fun, they don't cost money and anybody can do it."

Dr. Sam Wang is an associate professor of neuroscience at Princeton University. Dr. Sandra Aamodt is a former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience. They are also the co-authors of Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.

Interview Highlights

On rewards vs. punishment

Dr. Aamodt: "With a child, you're not only concerned with getting a child to behave. You're also concerned with building a good relationship with your child. You want your child to think of you as a wonderful person to be around. You also don't want to teach our kids that the way we solve our interpersonal problems is with violence."

Dr. Wang: "Negative reinforcement is often not very effective with deterring behavior. ... negative reinforcement punishment tends to not be very general. So the child will avoid doing the specific thing that led to the punishment and not learn some broader rule. From a practical standpoint, negative reinforcement is not terribly effective."

On time out

Dr. Wang: "One thing that's similar between how children and non-human animals learn best is the phenomenon of time out which has entered the lexicon as a means of getting a child to avoid doing something later. It comes from technical literature from which the long phrase is 'time out and reinforcement' which is if the kid does something undesirable, you simply take the child go to the corner and just sit there. And you don't say anything at all. You don't have to be negative. You don't have to mete out a punishment. You just have to say 'Sit there for 3 minutes and when I come back, we're done.' And then you forget about it and move on. This works at all ages."

On stress and pregnancy

Dr. Aamodt: "Stress is not good for babies. No ethics review board in the world would approve [an experiment] in which we deliberately damaged [pregnant women's] babies. But there are these so-called experiments of nature. One experiment that was done looked at women who had been evacuated from a hurricane in Louisiana when they were pregnant. What that study found was a substantially increased rate of autism in babies who had been in their fifth or sixth month of gestation at the time they fled the hurricane. The effect was stronger in cases where the hurricane was more dangerous."

On 'tiger parenting'

Dr. Wang: "I'm not very much of a tiger mother. I'm more of a pussy cat dad." [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Poison In The Post: Revisiting 'American Anthrax'

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 12:44:00 GMT

In the anxious aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, former Defense Secretary William Cohen warned "the next terrorist attack could well involve a contagious agent carried to our soil or airspace in a briefcase or a bottle." Within weeks, letters laced with anthrax were sent to United States senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, The New York Post and American Media Inc., the publisher of The National Enquirer. Killing five people, infecting at least 17 others and contaminating workplaces in New York, D.C. and Boca Raton, Florida, the combined attacks were the worst act of bioterrorism in American history.

In American Anthrax, Jeanne Guillemin provides an intriguing and insightful, account of a time in which Americans found it difficult to breathe easily. A trained anthropologist and senior fellow in the security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Guillemin is equally adept at weighing forensic evidence in a book that reads, in part, as a whodunit, putting a human face on the tragedy by telling the stories of the postal employees exposed to the lethal disease; and providing a judicious, data-driven assessment of the response of politicians, national security experts and public officials to the crisis.

Guillemin recaptures the climate of fear that made it impossible for the government to strike a balance between informing and alarming the public. The use of tons of chlorine dioxide gas to decontaminate the Hart Building of the U.S. Senate; a lengthy, leak-filled FBI investigation of the wrong man; the decision of the Bush Administration to use the attacks to build support for a war against Iraq — all of these things, Guillemin writes, served to ignite a media feeding-frenzy. In the fall of 2001, a Newsweek poll revealed that eight of ten Americans thought it at least "somewhat likely" that a massive biological or chemical attack was imminent. They were not reassured when Postmaster General Jack Potter promised to send every American a postcard describing how to identify potentially dangerous mail.

Following the attack, policy makers became fixated on bioterrorism, "almost as if no greater threat to national health existed," writes Guillemin. The federal budget for biodefense research and development, which had been $271 million in 2001, skyrocketed to $3.73 billion in 2003. By contrast, appropriations for chronic disease prevention, childhood immunization and occupational safety declined.

These billions of dollars of expenditures may or may not be responsible for the absence of subsequent bioterrorism attacks on our shores. What is certain is that the investment didn't lead to a conviction. The FBI built a strong circumstantial case against Bruce Ivins, a microbiologist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. But Ivins killed himself in 2008, leaving the whodunit unresolved. Since the likely murderer was a government employee with access to classified (and lethal) material despite evident psychological problems, Americans, Guillemin points out, had another reason to doubt that their government could protect them.

Guillemin understands that the United States had to prepare for biological and chemical warfare. She makes a compelling case in American Anthrax, however, that the response was "extravagantly out of proportion to known threats," and that in these perilous times, we can — and we must — learn to live with fear, not in fear. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Patricia Marx Tells A Tale Of Sweet, Unbalanced Love

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:46:00 GMT

Here's a warning: if you start reading Patricia Marx's new novel in public, you might just find yourself snorting out loud — and with some explaining to do.

The book, Starting From Happy, is a sharp-edged love story told in 618 mini-chapters. It's sprinkled with Marx's quirky line drawings of origami instructions, pie charts, pasta shapes, and — for no apparent reason — a kumquat.

Marx, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former writer for Saturday Night Live, describes her protagonist, lingerie designer Imogene Gilfeather, as an atypical female lead.

"Imogene Gilfeather says things that I wouldn't dare to say and doesn't become a better character in the end of the book," Marx tells NPR's Melissa Block. "She has been described by one character as 'a big No.' The other character — the one who she's involved with, Wally Yez — is 'a big Yes.'"

Imogene thinks she's doing just fine on her own, so when people try to fix her up with Wally, telling her he's perfect for her, Imogene's response is telling: "Perfect ... is not my type."

"I wanted to write a book about a single woman who wasn't desperately lonely and yearning to be with a guy," Marx says. "I kind of wanted to reverse the conventional roles of man and woman in a romantic comedy: the man being much more ardent; the woman being much more committed to her work and committed to not making any commitments."

Wally, the scientist with a fondness for reading instruction manuals, is a different story.

"He is as enthusiastic as Imogene is not," Marx says. "He's just a happy guy."

'It's One Of Those Things. Like Soil Erosion.'

Scattered throughout Marx's novel are pages that are practically blank, except for one-liners like "Everyone has a mother" and "It's one of those things. Like soil erosion." Think of them as shorter, more concise versions of the everyday chapter. Marx likes to call them "chaplettes."

"I'm sort of temperamentally terse," she says. "The book before this, I forced myself to get up to 20 pages per chapter, but truly I can reduce everything to about a word. If I were Shakespeare's editor, 'To be, or not to be' would be just 'Be,' question mark."

There's also an aesthetic appeal in Marx's chaplettes.

"As a writer, [I] think visually," Marx says. "And I like a pretty page, so I thought this would be kind of a nifty look with lots of blank space."

On Getting Away With Comedy

Marx has been known to say that she writes comedy because she's too shallow to do anything else.

"Being serious just makes me a little bit embarrassed," she says. "I write the shopping column. I think I've proven my superficiality."

But being the funny person can also be a burden — like when people ask her to say something funny when she isn't necessarily feeling it.

"[I] just say, 'Not today — not on Thursdays,'" Marx tells Block. "You come up with something. And then the advantage is [that] if you are billed as being funny, people laugh even if you say, 'The wall is white.' ... They don't want to not get the joke." [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

'Night Circus' Comes To Town With Magic, Mystery

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:33:00 GMT

Magic has never really gone out of style. As long as mere mortals have been telling stories, they've dreamed up tales of gods and demons, monsters and magicians. But for the last several hundred years, those stories have been competing with the reality-based fiction of the modern novel; magic was thought to be the stuff of kids' books. But don't ask adults who grew up on Harry Potter to give up magic, says Salon reviewer Laura Miller:

"That generation has grown up to say: 'Yeah, I may want to read Jane Austen. I may want to read Jonathan Franzen. But I also want to read this intoxicating imaginative narrative as well. I don't want to have to leave that behind just because I'm a grown-up.' And really there is no reason that they should."

Miller, who says she has always loved fantasy fiction, is delighted to see this new trend. She says readers who might never have indulged in books about the fantastic now feel they have permission to take the plunge.

"Obviously there are many adults who have never had any problem with reading narratives with elements of the fantastic in them," Miller explains. "It's more the falling away of the idea that only a realistic narrative is sufficiently serious or sufficiently highbrow or sufficiently adult for a self-respecting reader. It's more that once that falls away, then the basic human desire for stories of the marvelous just comes flooding in."

Books like Lev Grossman's The Magician King and George R.R. Martin's A Dance With Dragons have already captured readers' imaginations this summer. Poised to grab a chunk of this readership is The Night Circus by first-time novelist Erin Morgenstern. It's the story of a mysterious circus that is the setting for a prolonged life-or-death competition between two young magicians. Before it's all over, the two competitors defy all the rules of the game by falling in love with each other.

"I figured out pretty early on that it wasn't a regular circus and that there were magical things creeping around the edges," Morgenstern says. Her own interest in fantasy grew out of her love for books like Alice in Wonderland and later, magic realism.

"My magic is sort of real world magic," she says. "I like that accessibility of maybe the circus would show up in your own back yard. It makes it seem a little closer."

An artist as well as a writer, Morgenstern describes the circus vividly. It is entirely black and white and made up of a series of tents, each one a fully realized world. No one knows where or when the circus will appear: "The circus arrives without warning," Morgenstern writes. "No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not."

The magic in the book is real. The two young contestants, Marco and Celia, have trained their entire lives for the competition, the rules of which they only barely understand. But if they are in the dark, the people around them are even more so. They think the magic of the circus is trickery — a very sophisticated sleight of hand. No one is quite sure what is real and what is fake.

"I liked the idea of having actual magic performed as stage magic so you could assume that it was just a trick, that something was all smoke and mirrors, but there's that feeling in the back of your mind: What if it's not?"

As mind-boggling as Marco's and Celia's tricks may be, they still have to play by certain rules. Morgenstern has allowed their magic to go only so far in helping them shape their own destinies.

"The phrase 'nothing is impossible' comes up a lot," she says. "I think I wanted to play with that a little bit and have ... limits to what can be done: That there was a life-and-death aspect, that they can't fix certain things."

Magic may not be able to fix everything, but in the world of books, it's a force to be reckoned with — and enjoyed. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Roger Ebert's 'Life Itself': A Real Life Reclaimed From Encroaching Sainthood

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:11:00 GMT

The biggest threat to Roger Ebert, the writer, is probably Roger Ebert, the saint.

In the last five years, since cancer and its complications left him unable to speak, Ebert has become the very model of an old-media writer who enthusiastically embraced the internet and found a whole new audience and a whole new degree of cultural currency. He's also become the very model of a man who survived a potentially devastating physical trial without self-pity. Add his seemingly idyllic marriage to his wife Chaz, his oddly endearing passion for rice cookers (even after he could no longer eat himself), and a continuing ability to write vibrant, populist film criticism that can be incisive but also terribly funny, and you have a man who sometimes seems eclipsed by his own narrative. Deification is not good for writers, particularly when they are still writing.

Ebert's new book, Life Itself, is built on some of the blogging he's done during those years and on the style of storytelling he developed while doing it, but it also expands substantially on his life, less in the form of a traditional memoir than in a series of short but dense meditations on everything from cancer to sex to Robert Mitchum. It walks back some of the legend simply by reconnecting readers to a more specific, nuanced version of the man.

As he says in the book's introduction, Ebert found that his illness and the silence it imposed led him to explore his own memory as he wrote, and he was often surprised at the specificity and meticulousness with which it had preserved his life: "I started in a direction and the memories were waiting there, sometimes of things I hadn't consciously thought about since."

What follows is a sort of compulsive cataloging of an entire life, with the strengths and weaknesses that implies. Certainly, there are times when the level of detail becomes overwhelming — when the names being dropped, not in self-aggrandizement but simply in thoroughness, become atmosphere rather than narrative, and the ethereal effect of being immersed in someone else's life is felt more than the actual stories can possibly be absorbed.

Ebert also writes about his own life — particularly his very early life — with a knowingly musty, sepia tone that can be utterly charming but can also lapse into the coyly archaic. When he remembers being a little kid fearful that teenagers at the movies would give him a "knuckle sandwich," it brings a smile, but when he refers to his female relatives who never married and therefore "died spinsters," it feels like a nostalgic longing for a simpler view of women that women themselves probably don't miss.

Of course, particularly when a memoir contains this much honesty, it can seem almost unwittingly blunt, as if the writer is being obtuse in not performing the same psychoanalysis you're tempted to engage in as the reader. It's tempting to draw a straight line from Ebert's description of his "paralyzing reluctance to engage [his] mother's anger" and his bottomless affection for the most traditionally masculine actors and directors: Mitchum, Russ Meyer, John Wayne, Lee Marvin, Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese — all of whom receive their own essays. (The only woman, other than his mother and wife, who has an essay about her here is Oprah Winfrey.) But this book, like most books, would probably fall under its own weight if all of these things were explained and all the subtext made into text; no one is particularly brilliant at being his own analyst, after all.

There are the stories of the things you already know: his friendship with Gene Siskel and Siskel's death, the multiple incarnations of their television show, and of course, his illness and his surgeries. One of the finest blog items he's ever written, an essay called "Nil By Mouth," is reproduced here, and remains a beautifully bittersweet reflection on the loss of food as an emotional and social experience. He writes about his alcoholism, which he only revealed in 2009, 30 years after he stopped drinking.

But there are bawdier tales as well. He explains how he wound up writing the screenplay for Meyer's Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, tours his early sex life in some considerable and often gleeful detail, and vividly remembers a surprising number of details about various women's breasts.

Perhaps the most telling chapter in the book is the one where Ebert explains a compulsion he has to revisit the same places over and over. When he travels, he eats at the same restaurants and orders the same things and wants to sit in the same places and see the same views. He and Chaz spent their honeymoon in Europe, and he recalls someone asking her what they visited while they were there. "We visited Roger's previous visits," he recalls her saying. "These visits do not involve only a visit, but a meditation," he says. "I have been here before, I am here now, I will be here again." The book is the same way, really: It circles back to these stories, turning them over and over, looking at them with a kind of decisive nostalgia, deeming them worth the same kind of meditation as a favorite restaurant, simply because circling back is valuable.

What makes Life Itself an insightful book is not only the way it tells stories, but its thoughtfulness about storytelling and documenting and why they matter. Ebert does not want, and should not be force-fed, the patronizing notion that these are somehow his parting words, that he is getting all of this off his chest before he dies. Instead, he gives the impression of having found what is useful in what is awful. Whatever else has been taken — and he does not hesitate to lustily miss food, conversation or his previous appearance — he has time to reflect and to write, and so that's what he's doing. In its poignant admission of the opportunities presented by enforced silence that are almost impossible to find otherwise, this angle of the story almost calls to mind Burgess Meredith in that Twilight Zone episode, if he hadn't broken his glasses and he had been expertly and generously loved rather than left alone. Ebert's own memories are his library full of books, and Life Itself is the result of having enough time to spend with them.

Note: Melissa Block spends some quality time with Roger Ebert on today's All Things Considered; we will link to that audio as soon as it's available. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

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