THIS LIFE

by Sidney Poitier ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1980

Rags to riches, nobody to Somebody, naivetÉ to grave worldliness--Poitier's vibrant autobiography is above all a book of transformations, all of them recorded with a rare, sharp self-awareness. Youngest child of a proud Bahamian farmer, Sidney saw life go from plain to bleak when the family moved from Cat Island: ""That place Nassau was not good for raising tomatoes or children."" So at 15 Sidney was shipped to relations in Miami--where he met the Klan, couldn't keep a job (learning to drive by working as a car-parker, kamikaze-style), and ran away . . . to WW II N.Y. and fabled Harlem. Dishwashing, sleeping on roofs, a sorry stint in the Army, semi-vagrancy--till the clay he wandered into an audition at the American Negro Theatre and, after reading one fine, was told: ""Boy, get off that stage. . . . You can hardly talk. . . . And you can hardly read."" So a furious Sidney flattened his accent by buying a radio and repeating everything it said; and he made himself a literate dishwasher by studying (aided by an old Jewish waiter) the newspaper every night. The theater, desperate for men, then grudgingly took him on: bits and touring quickly led to films. But a (slowly) rising career brought eye-openers (filming in scary S. Africa) and knowing friends (Robeson, Canada Lee), and art soon became politics: TV work threatened by blacklisting; refusing roles without positive ""significance"" (doing Porgy and Bess only so he could do Defiant Ones); fights with Lorraine Hansberry about the black-male image in Raisin in the Sun; accepting derision as a button-down Uncle Tom (some choices ""were merely the best of a bad lot""); waiting out the black-exploitation era to return as the mastermind of Uptown Saturday Night. And Poitier is equally frank about personal turmoil: troubled first marriage; a long, ironically doomed affair with Diahann Carroll; nine years of crucial psychoanalysis; rocky pal-ship with Harry Belafonte; and the finally grown-up step into marriage with Joanna Shimkus after eight unwed years and two kids. True, some fans would prefer more anecdotal movie chat. But Poitier has decided to bear down on the things that really matter; and the result--delivered in an edgily unique voice (two parts stately precision, one part bawdy street-corner jive) is one of the best books ever to come out of Hollywood: direct, moving, warmly articulate, without the sleazy shadow of press-agentry anywhere in sight.

Pub Date: May 1, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION