In Memoriam Alex Trebek, 'the classy intellectual we always presumed him to be'

Many sites mourn the death of Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, reminding us of the fact that he was a Brontëite.

Trebek had been courageously documenting his life with cancer after being diagnosed in March 2019. He attended the TCM Classic Movies Film Festival in April of that year, giving a heartfelt and emotional introduction to the feature “Wuthering Heights.” (Kristen Lopez on IndieWire)

The Canadian-born quiz show maven shared in this memoir that his favorite film has always been How Green Was My Valley, while he and his beloved wife Jean enjoyed watching a slightly more recognizable classic together: Wuthering Heights (via People).

You can judge a lot about a man by his taste in movies, and Trebek's picks certainly suggest that he really was the classy intellectual we always presumed him to be. (Zach Lizabeth on Looper)

Part of his success came from the fact that he walked the walk. In his early years as host, he insisted on taking (and acing, of course) the contestant test each year; he kept a library stuffed with the classics at his home, and his and his wife Jean’s favorite vacation spot was the home of the Brontë family in England. (Claire McNear  on The Ringer)

Rebecca is back. World Socialist Web Site discusses both the 1940 and the 2020 adaptations claiming that,

Rebecca was not a second Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel—a work alive with social protest and anger, to which du Maurier’s book is often compared—or anything like it. (David Walsh)

National Review thinks it is.

Mimicking the Gothic novels of the previous century, in particular the Brontë sisters’ classics such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Rebecca is what we might call a “psychological thriller.” This particular genre demands two (potentially contradictory) qualities, plausibility and unpredictability. Ben Wheatley’s recent Netflix adaptation has neither. (Madeleine Kearns)

San Francisco Chronicle interviews Michiko Kakutani, author of the beautiful Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread.

Q: Do you think reading books — including “Ex Libris” — can catalyze empathy in any reader?

A: Empathy — the ability, as the saying goes, to walk in another’s shoes — can help bridge divides, enable people to engage in conversation (as opposed to confrontation), and bring people from very different backgrounds together with a shared sense of purpose. As Pope Francis put it: Empathy can help bring about “a true human dialogue in which words, ideas and questions arise from an experience of fraternity and shared humanity.”

James Baldwin has also pointed out that books can alleviate isolation and loneliness: “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.”

Fiction does show how the powers of imagination can help us identify with people from other cultures and other eras. But while Dostoyevsky might stir empathy in one reader, it might be Tolstoy — or Dickens or Plath or Emily Bronte — in the case of another. Sometimes, it’s nonfiction that inspires us to discover a vocation that calls out to us (be it comedy in Judd Apatow’s book “Sick in the Head” or botany in Hope Jahren’s “Lab Girl”), or new worlds we become eager to explore (like the northernmost parts of the planet in Barry Lopez’s “Arctic Dreams” or the far reaches of South America in Bruce Chatwin’s “In Patagonia”).

I hope “Ex Libris” introduces readers to new books — or spurs them to reread old favorites — that catalyze such feelings of empathy and enthusiasm. (Steve Kettmann)

Financial Times recommends some new releases in YA fiction.

When it comes to recklessness, Emilia in the Kingdom of the Wicked by Kerri Maniscalco (Hodder, £14.99) takes the biscotto. A Sicilian witch, or strega, she works alongside her twin Vittoria in the family’s Palermo restaurant under the strict guidance of their nonna, who as well as initiating them into the delicious intricacies of the local cuisine has warned the girls never to have any dealings with the dark powers. Emilia’s promise is broken, however, when Vittoria is murdered. Fearlessly invoking a scary but strangely handsome demon, she proceeds to insult this prince of darkness, in line with the romance convention of instant mutual dislike. He’s basically Heathcliff with a whiff of sulphur and a dash of the sexy vampires in Twilight. Thanks to a nifty bit of Latin, Wrath, as he likes to be known, is bound to Emilia for all eternity, which seems like a flaw in the cosmic plan, somehow. But the recipes sound great. (Suzi Feay)