For 23 years, LeVar Burton told American children that books were theirs to open. In his new memoir, he says the show gave something back: a place to put his purpose while he was coming apart.
“It gave me an anchor and someplace to put my purpose while I was figuring myself out,” Burton told People about Reading Rainbow, as Atlanta Black Star and TheGrio reported. In “Take My Word for It,” published Nov. 10 by Random House, he writes that he had a mental breakdown during his years on the PBS series and has been diagnosed with bipolar II disorder.
The book runs 352 pages and was written with Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts. It follows Burton from a childhood in the civil rights era and a mother he credits as a formative force, to the role that made him a star, Kunta Kinte in “Roots,” and then Geordi La Forge on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Reading Rainbow, which he hosted from 1983 to 2006, brought him 12 Daytime Emmys and a Peabody Award.
For Black readers, the show was never a neutral piece of children’s television. A Black man sat with kids on screen and treated reading as an adventure that belonged to them. Burton says he did not grasp the size of that until those children grew up. “I didn’t get its impact until the original ‘Reading Rainbow’ generation was old enough to confront me themselves,” he told People.
The memoir also covers his father, the death of his sister Valencia and the women, including his mother, older sister, wife and daughter, he credits with getting him through. He told People the book is “my opportunity to go on record, to weigh in, as it were.”
Burton has spent decades arguing for literacy, and his publisher says the book carries that fight into the present, including his opposition to book bans. A man who built his career on putting books in children’s hands has a standing most of the people pulling them from shelves do not.
It also matters that a Black public figure of his stature is saying plainly that he struggled. Burton saying so, in his own book, gives the readers who grew up with him permission to say it too.
The audiobook is narrated by Burton himself.
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