Publishers Weekly
Watlington was a poor African-American boy in LBJ-era New York City whose intellectual acuity landed him scholarships to several prestigious prep school programs as the "token Negro," including the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. But the street lured him back; he became addicted to heroin at 13, was in gangs at 15 and incarcerated at 17. Later he was tempted by alcohol and crack cocaine. Watlington's healing came through acting, teaching and knowing the right women: his first wife, African-American actress Gerri Griffin; their daughter, Avery; his Caucasian wife of the past two decades, Anne; the Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple; and his lifelong friend, Gail Sheehy, who'd written about him when he was at Hotchkiss. Watlington views his childhood, adolescence and rise as a television writer and screenwriter through the scrim of racism. His tale is remarkable, if incomplete (his father and siblings are rarely mentioned, his mother appears only as a vicious harridan, he never explains why he chooses drugs and crime, he glosses over his successes), and the overabundance of colloquial slang and the excessive use of "nigger" make for hard going. Nevertheless, it's a compelling story of one man's struggle to define his place as a black man in white America. (Feb. 15) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Watlington, an Emmy Award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker (The Untold West: The Black West), writes a dark, raw, and revealing narrative of the first 40 years of his life that begins in early 1950s Harlem, NY. Through his firsthand experiences, we witness some of the cultural changes in black America brought on by Jim Crow laws, Martin Luther King Jr., the Civil Rights Movement, rock'n'roll, early attempts at educational integration, the rise of the drug lords in the ghetto and the development of gang warfare, and the growing hatred and violence that eventually drives him out of his home turf. Although he came of age in exciting times, Watlington unfortunately fails to engage the reader's sympathy as he bungles his way through opportunities, making self-destructive choices and revealing inconsistencies in his behavior. For example, he proudly describes his public speaking work with a drug prevention program, yet at the time he was a user. His text moves backward and forward with sometimes jarring results, and his excessive use of profanity and streetwise ghetto talk, almost incomprehensible to the uninitiated, detracts from the effectiveness of his message. Order on demand only.-Crystal Renfro, Georgia Inst. of Technology, Lib. and Information Ctr., Atlanta Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An Emmy Award-winner pens a coming-of-age tale in the tradition of Manchild in the Promised Land, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Soul on Ice. Old enough to have been called "colored," "Negro," "black" and, finally, "African-American," Watlington reached adolescence at the height of the civil rights movement. The son of a religious mother and a father embittered by Jim Crow, Watlington displayed youthful bad behavior that got him briefly exiled to the South Carolina home of his poverty-stricken grandparents. He returned to Harlem and a street career that included episodes as a purse-snatcher, gang leader, reform schooler and heroin addict, but his intellectual precocity and athletic talent made him the ideal affirmative-action candidate. Following stints at the Peddie and Hotchkiss Schools and NYU, and with the help of mentors both black and white, Watlington became an actor, a community leader, a playwright, a journalist and a screenwriter. During the '70s, a toxic mixture of heroin and welfare all but destroyed his neighborhood and the many friends he periodically left behind during forays into the white world, which included Zelig-like brushes with the likes of Harry Belafonte, Robert De Niro, Melanie Griffith, Tina Brown and enduring relationships with actor Bruce Willis, author Gail Sheehy and film documentarian Barbara Kopple. Drug addiction threatened his interracial second marriage and forced him to come to terms with a life spent crossing between white and black America, where his default role had been to explain each side to the other. Watlington's story is so improbable, his thirst for experience so intense, his manner so heartfelt, that readers will look past the occasionalpatches of overripe prose.
