A Book and a Child

"Every book is like a child" a phrase goes and I seem to be hearing a lot of it. It must have been started by people who have raised a child or written a book. But anyone who has done both knows that although books and children are creations, there the similarity ends.

A book is a creation of the author's imagination. The input depends on the author's genetic make-up, his character and his experiences. He has ideas and thoughts, he chooses words and the end result is exactly what he has compiled. A child on the other hand is God's (or nature's if you prefer) creation. The input here is the child's make-up (its DNA), the child's experiences and the parent's guidance. A parent may have ideas and thoughts, he can devise a plan or execute a method and put in his best effort. The end result might be close to what he wants, it might be approximate to what he wants but it may well be the exact opposite.

Roger Ebert: Life Itself

Roger Ebert, America's best known film critic, looks hard in the mirror and at his own life as if it were a movie.

He was the late child of a German electrician and an Irish catholic in Urbana, Illinois. “I turned to books as soon as I could read,” he says. “There was a persistent need not only to write, but to publish”. He started out in public school by writing and publishing the Washington Street News and delivering it to his neighbours. In college he was a sportswriter for The News Gazette and editor for the Daily Illini. He studied English literature at the University of Illinois and went to the University of Cape Town, South Africa for his post graduate studies. He gave up his Ph.D. studies at the University of Chicago to work for the Chicago Sun-Times. He envisaged himself as a column writer but one day someone retired and he was named the paper's film critic. “It was not my career goal” he says, and yet even with this random assignment his hard work earned him the Pulitzer price for his film writings. Furthermore his movie reviews with Gene Siskel were televised across America for twenty years. His sheer enthusiasm and intelligence make many of his reviews far more interesting and fun to read than the good movies they criticize.

Michael Caine: The Elephant to Hollywood

Michael Caine's second autobiography (the first being 1992's What's It All About) is like certain Western movie sets: a highly entertaining facade with nothing behind it.

Maurice Micklewhite started life in the London slums (Elephant & Castle) from working class parents and barely made a living in the theatre. Later in life he changed his name first to Michael Scott then to Michael Caine, became a movie star and moved to Hollywood. Mr Caine attributes it all to good luck and then goes on to recite countless stories or anecdotes of his experiences with his famous and very good friends. His language is straight forward and the book is highly entertaining. There is a laugh to be had at the end of every paragraph. The feeling you get is that you are having a quiet chat with him in a coffee shop. And after talking to you for an hour or two, I am sure he will call you his friend, and even give you the recipe of his delicious baked potatoes, which he does, near the end of the book. What a nice man!

If you want a coffee shop chat with Michael Caine, and haven't read What's It All About, I would highly recommend it. It's a longer and perhaps more interesting book. Not much has happened to him in the last eighteen years, and three quarters of this one is more or less an abbreviated repetition of his first one. But if you want to know something about the real Michael Caine, you are not in luck.