Book Review: Media Edge: Media Logic and Social Reality, by David L. Altheide

Abstract

cancer which was to take his life, as it did Gene Siskel's a decade-plus earlier. All is treated with unstinting candor.Best offsetting the gloom and doom are the chapters "My Romances" and "Chaz," especially the latter, focusing on Chaz Hammel Smith, the love he found relatively late in life in a biracial marriage, becoming Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert. She pervades the volume in 21 contexts between pages 2 and 405.Displaying love of another kind, canine love, are five pages about Blackie and Ming, Ebert's childhood pets, and the neighbor's four-legged tail-wagers, Pepper and Snookers.Ebert, born into Catholicism, gives the final 10 pages to thoughtful discussion of what he had too much cause, for much too long, to think about: death. And what, if anything, comes next. They are worth perusal, in and of themselves.