November 2025 — Opposable Thumbs, by Matt Singer

📖 Why this book? 📖

“Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever”

It’s movie award season 🏆 🎥 🍿 and NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour recommended this book in its “Books We Love: No Biz Like Showbiz” episode .

Nostalgic-Novembers: We read memoirs for the last three Novembers in a row. Now another “November to remember”

Published October 24, 2023

Hard to find a book? Suggest a title or use Zip Books at your local library.

💠 What can I expect? 💠

We will meet in-person after hours in Time Tested Books. Front door willl be unlocked, and staff will point the way.

💬 We catch up socially for the first 30 minutes,
🧊 at 7pm we do a brief icebreaker in which we mention a book or author we recommend,
📕 and then we start our book discussion.

👜 WHAT DO I BRING? 👜

◾️A snack to share (whatever you like!)
◾️$5 (cash or venmo, details below)
◾️And you could bring your book 😄

✴️ Event Details ✴️

The $5 is split between two things: our access to this Meetup platform and our access to the meeting location.

Meetup has raised its annual fees, and Time Tested Books is keeping the store open after hours for our group. You can venmo me (https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Bon) or bring cash.

However❕We would never want you to miss a book club discussion because of the $5, so please message me if you have any concerns.

Thanks, and see you all soon!

📚 ** BOOK SUMMARY ** 📚

Once upon a time, if you wanted to know if a movie was worth seeing, you didn't check out Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB.

You asked whether Siskel & Ebert had given it "two thumbs up."

On a cold Saturday afternoon in 1975, two men (who had known each other for eight years before they'd ever exchanged a word) met for lunch in a Chicago pub. Gene Siskel was the film critic for the Chicago Tribune. Roger Ebert had recently won the Pulitzer Prize — the first ever awarded to a film critic — for his work at the Chicago Sun-Times. To say they despised each other was an understatement.

When they reluctantly agreed to collaborate on a new movie review show with PBS, there was at least as much sparring off-camera as on. No decision — from which films to cover to who would read the lead review to how to pronounce foreign titles — was made without conflict, but their often-antagonistic partnership (which later transformed into genuine friendship) made for great television. In the years that followed, their signature "Two thumbs up!" would become the most trusted critical brand in Hollywood.

In Opposable Thumbs, award-winning editor and film critic Matt Singer eavesdrops on their iconic balcony set, detailing their rise from making a few hundred dollars a week on local Chicago PBS to securing multimillion-dollar contracts for a syndicated series (a move that convinced a young local host named Oprah Winfrey to do the same). Their partnership was cut short when Gene Siskel passed away in February of 1999 after a battle with brain cancer that he'd kept secret from everyone outside his immediate family — including Roger Ebert, who never got to say goodbye to his longtime partner. But their influence on in the way we talk about (and think about) movies continues to this day.

Photographer/© ABC/Getty Images.