dpTo a generation of kids, LeVar Burton was the warm, steady host of Reading Rainbow, the man who reminded them they didn’t have to take his word for it. But in his new memoir, he takes readers somewhere he rarely went on camera: a childhood shaped by a father who vanished from his life.
Burton’s parents split when he was 11, and he was estranged from his father for decades, Finding Your Roots host Henry Louis Gates Jr. said during Burton’s appearance on the PBS series. “Once he and my mom split up, I didn’t have any contact with him at all until Roots came out a decade later,” Burton told AARP this summer.
That issue is at the center of Take My Word for It, which Random House publishes Nov. 10. Written with Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts, the book traces Burton’s upbringing in 1960s Sacramento, where strong women stepped in for his absent father, according to Publishers Weekly. “I am who I am because of my mother. Full stop,” he writes.
His mother, a high school English teacher, is the person Burton has long credited for his love of reading. She was also “the first person in her family to graduate from college,” he told AARP.
The memoir moves through the three roles that made Burton a household name across generations. He dropped out of college to play Kunta Kinte in the 1977 miniseries Roots, went on to host Reading Rainbow and later played the blind engineer Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The book also discusses mental illness and “why he’s become a literacy activist,” The Week noted, citing The New York Times.
Burton has described the sweep of those parts as a rare arc. “I have been able to portray the Black experience in America,” he told AARP, “from our enslavement to space flight.”
Landing Roots at 19 had a personal impact too. The role moved Burton to start “extending my arms to my Blackness in a way I had not before,” he writes, per Publishers Weekly’s review. His 23 years on Reading Rainbow, meanwhile, gave him the credibility to become a leading voice for literacy.
The father he barely knew stayed with him through all of it. “My father passed recently. We had a pretty complex relationship,” Burton, 69, said. When the news came, he added, “I felt complete.”
Early reviews have embraced that candor. Time called the book a “compassionate, vulnerable memoir,” and Kirkus Reviews described it as “a disarmingly candid memoir of a lifelong project of personal growth.”
For readers who grew up with Burton on PBS or aboard the Enterprise, the memoir offers a fuller portrait of the man behind those roles, including the family story that shaped how he has spent his life championing books.
This story was originally published by Parade on Nov 8, 2026, where it first appeared in the Books section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
