Saturday, August 3, 2013, 2:00 to 3:15 p.m., San Leandro Main Library

Life Itself by Roger Ebert

1957 Studebaker Golden Hawk advancing

Be sure to check the video marquee in the lobby for the room for our meeting, as they switched rooms on us last month.

Roger Ebert Lives

One of the things I noticed as I was reading Life Itself was how it felt like Roger Ebert was present in person and telling me his story. You can get that same feeling at his blog, "Roger Ebert's Journal," which contains much of the material used in the book along with a whole lot more. His wife Chaz also has a blog. Needless to say, a number of clips from Roger Ebert's various television shows with Gene Siskel ust for the heck of it, I went to YouTube to see what was the most popular Siskel and Ebert clip, and for some reason, this was it.



Ebert didn't dislike every movie he saw though. At his journal site, you can also click a link which takes you to written reviews of movies he considers to be great movies.

Odds and Ends about Roger Ebert

University of Illinois and "Chief Illiniwek": One of the times I found myself disagreeing most with Roger Ebert was not about a movie review but was about the campaign by Native American student activists to retire the University of Illinois sports mascot, "Chief Illiniwek." I remember Ebert defending the mascot. Apparently, he eventually came to "intellectually" accept the reasons for the retirement of "The Chief" as a mascot, but only reluctantly, and continued to view the mascot as a tragic romantic figure. I wish I could give you some links about this, but every link to anything solid that Ebert actually said on the topic appears to be broken.

On Betraying Your Mentor: It was particularly interesting for me to read in the chapter about his time at the University of Illinois (see specifically page 95) that Ebert had once published a review of a book by his mentor, Daniel Curley, a man he spoke of as a second father, having called Curley's book the work of a "first-rate second-rate writer." This stood out for me, because right at the time Roger Ebert died earlier this year, we had been in the middle of reading The Paris Wife and had discussed the way in which Ernest Hemingway always seemed to turn on almost anybody who had ever helped him. Thus, my attention was captured by one of the many online tributes to Roger Ebert, this one written by Will Leitch, a sportswriter who attended the University of Illinois and who had been given encouragement and advice by Roger Ebert during his university days and early in his career. You can read this post about how he eventually repaid Ebert's kindness and how Ebert reacted to that. Now, having read the book and realizing that Roger Ebert had had his own similar moment early in his career, I wonder how much of Ebert's response was informed by his own moment of weakness when he was young.

1957 Studebaker Golden Hawk retreating

Remembering Roger Ebert

Life Itself, the Roger Ebert autobiography that we are reading for our August 3 discussion, gives a more in-depth and detailed look at the man behind the movie reviews, but the truth is that Roger Ebert has always tried to place himself squarely into his reviews, letting us know what he experienced and how he felt about the movie rather than objectively analyzing it. Below is a clip from what is possibly Ebert's most iconic review, part of a 1994 year-end review with Gene Siskel in which they both chose a movie called "North" as their worst movie of the year. It inspired the title of a later book that Ebert wrote. Unfortunately the only clip on YouTube was recorded on a VCR with a dirty recording head, so the quality isn't that great.

Saturday, July 13, 2013, 2:00 p.m., San Leandro Main Library — Arrange Your Face and Be There

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Biographical information about Hilary Mantel from her Harper Collins page:

• Born in northern Derbyshire in 1952. 
• Educated at a convent school in Cheshire.
• Went on to the London School of Economics and Sheffield University, where she studied law. 
• Briefly was a social worker in a geriatric hospital, and much later used her experiences in her novels Every Day is Mother's Day and Vacant Possession. 
• Went in 1977 to live in Botswana with her husband, then a geologist. 
• Moved on in 1982 to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, where she would set her third novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street.
• Published first novel in 1985. Returned to the UK the following year..
• Awarded the 1987 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing, and became the film critic of the Spectator. 
• Reviews widely for a range of newspapers and magazines, and is currently working on the sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, to be called The Mirror and the Light.

Other novels and awards:

• Fourth novel, Fludd, was awarded the Cheltenham Festival Prize, the Southern Arts Literature Prize, and the Winifred Holtby Prize.
• Fifth novel, A Place of Greater Safety, won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award.
• A Change of Climate, published in 1993, is the story of an East Anglian family, former missionaries, torn apart by conflicts generated in Southern Africa in the early years of Apartheid. An Experiment in Love published in 1995, is a story about childhood and university life, set in London in 1970. It was awarded the Hawthornden Prize.
• Beyond Black, published in 2005, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, while Wolf Hall won the 2009 Man Booker Prize, and Bring Up the Bodies, its sequel, won the 2012 Man Booker Prize.

If you have time, scroll down and take a look at the four prior posts here on subjects relevant to Wolf Hall and the times of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. In particular, I would point your attention to the post of June 9 and the link to the sound file and transcript in the London Review of Books in which Hilary Mantel discusses "Royal Bodies" and the public's obsession with royal females as arbiters of fashion and as dynastic brood mares.

Beverly also pointed me to an interview of Hilary Mantel on "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, which aired on November 26, 2012.

Not that Cromwell — the Other Cromwell

Thomas Cromwell: The protagonist of Wolf Hall

The name "Cromwell" is probably familiar to you if you were fortunate enough to grow up in the era when we were all expected to know something of European history, especially as it related to US history. That is probably because of Oliver Cromwell, an English parliamentarian and military man who was a leader of the "Roundhead" faction in the English civil war which took place in the mid 1600s. Oliver Cromwell was one of the signatories of the death warrant of King Charles I in 1649, and he later became Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England during a brief period between 1649 and 1660 when England was without a king, and Parliament was the ultimate authority. The name of Cromwell is much reviled, especially in Ireland, because of his role first in the military subjugation of Ireland and then in near-genocidal punitive measures taken afterward against Catholics in Scotland and Ireland.

Oliver Cromwell: Great great great nephew of Thomas

So was Oliver Cromwell related to Thomas Cromwell, and if so, how? Well, you will recall from the book that Cromwell's nephew Richard Williams changed his name to Richard Cromwell to honor his uncle Thomas, who was his guardian. Richard Cromwell was the great grandfather of Oliver Cromwell, which makes Thomas Cromwell Oliver's thrice-great uncle.

 Not this Cromwell Either

Actor James Cromwell

The guy who played the farmer in the movie "Babe."