The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography

by Sidney Poitier

Overview

In this candid spiritual memoir, legendary actor Sidney Poitier reflects on life itself as he reveals the spiritual depth, passion, and intellectual fervor that has driven his remarkable life. Poitier credits his childhood of poverty on idyllic Cat Island in the Bahamas for equipping him with the unflinching sense of self-worth, family values, and simple ethics that he has never since surrendered and that have dramatically shaped his world.

Just a few years after his introduction to indoor plumbing and the automobile, Poitier broke countless barriers to launch a pioneering career portraying important, dignified characters in some of the most morally significant films of the late 20th century. Drawing on his personal journey, Poitier explores such themes as sacrifice and commitment, pride and humility, rage and survival, and paying the price for artistic integrity. His engaging memoir spans a time in history from Jim Crow segregation through the early Civil Rights conflicts to present-day cultural struggles and spiritual seeking. Poitier shares his provocative thoughts on racism in Hollywood, consumerism and the media, child-rearing, illness and mortality, honoring a higher consciousness, and realizing how fully a part of "the grand scheme" each of us is. This book is a powerful testament to the rewards of being true to one's self, acting passionately on one's convictions, and boldly walking on the edge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061357909
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	01/26/2007
Series:	Oprah's Book Club Series
Edition description:	Oprah's Book Club Edition
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	6,623
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Sidney Poitier was the first black actor to win the Academy Award for best actor for his outstanding performance in Lilies of the Field in 1963. His landmark films include The Defiant Ones, A Patch of Blue, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and To Sir, With Love. He has starred in over forty films, directed nine, and written four. He is the author of two autobiographies: This Life and the "Oprah's Book Club" pick and New York Times bestseller The Measure of a Man. Among many other accolades, Poitier has been awarded the Screen Actors Guild's highest honor, the Life Achievement Award, for an outstanding career and humanitarian accomplishment. He is married, has six daughters, four grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter.

Read an Excerpt

The Idyll

It's late at night as I lie in bed in the blue glow of the television set. I have the clicker in my hand, the remote control, and I go from 1 to 97, scrolling through the channels. I find nothing that warrants my attention, nothing that amuses me, so I scroll up again, channel by channel, from bottom to top. But already I've given it the honor of going from 1 to 97, and already I've found nothing. This vast, sophisticated technology and . . . nothing. It's given me not one smidgen of pleasure. It's informed me of nothing beyond my own ignorance and my own frailties.

But then I have the audacity to go up again! And what do I find? Nothing, of course. So at last, filled with loathing and self-disgust, I punch the damn TV off and throw the clicker across the room, muttering to myself, "What am I doing with my time?"

It's not as if I'm without other resources or material comforts, you follow? I've been very fortunate in life, and as I lie in my bed, I'm surrounded by beautiful things. Treasured books and art objects, photographs and mementos, lovely gardens on the balcony. After many years in this particular business in this particular town, I have a rich network of friends, some only a few steps away, dozens of others whom I could reach on the phone within seconds.

So what am I doing with my time?

Steeped in this foul, self-critical mood I lie back and close my eyes, trying to empty my head of all thought. It's late, time to sleep, so I determine to focus on that empty space in my consciousness and try to drift off. But images begin to come to me, infiltrating that darkness. Soft, sensuous images of a time very early inmy life when things were so much simpler, when my options for entertainment couldn't be counted on a scale from 1 to 97.

I'm on the porch of our little house on Cat Island in the Bahamas. It's the end of the day and evening is coming on, turning the sky and the sea to the west of us a bright burnt orange, and the sky and the sea to the east of us a cool blue that deepens to purple and then to black. In the gathering darkness, in the coolness of our porch, my mother and father sit and fan the smoke from green palm leaves they're burning to shoo away the mosquitoes and the sand flies. And as she did so often when I was small, my sister Teddy takes me in her arms to rock me to sleep. While she's rocking me in her arms, she too is fanning the smoke that comes from the big pot of green leaves being burned, and she fans the smoke around me as I try to go to sleep in her arms.

That's the way the evenings always were on Cat Island. In the simplicity of that setting I always knew how I was going to get through the day and how Mom and Dad were going to get through the day and how, at the end of it, we were all going to sit on this porch, fanning the smoke of the burning green leaves.

On that tiny spit of land they call Cat Island, life was indeed very simple, and decidedly preindustrial. Our cultural "authenticity" extended to having neither plumbing nor electricity, and we didn't have much in the way of schooling or jobs, either. In a word, we were poor, but poverty there was very different from poverty in a modern place characterized by concrete. It's not romanticizing the past to state that poverty on Cat Island didn't preclude gorgeous beaches and a climate like heaven, cocoa plum trees and sea grapes and cassavas growing in the forest, and bananas growing wild. Cat Island is forty-six miles long and three miles wide, and even as a small child I was free to roam anywhere. I climbed trees by myself at four and five years old and six and seven years old. I would get attacked by wasps, and I would go home with both eyes closed from having been stung on the face over and over. I would be crying and hollering and screaming and petrified, and my mom would take me and treat me with bush medicines from the old culture that you wouldn't believe, and then I would venture back out and go down to the water and fish alone.

I would even go in sometimes and swim by myself. I had the confidence, because when I was very small my mother threw me in the ocean and watched without moving as I struggled to survive. She watched as I screamed, yelled, gulped, and flailed in a panic-stricken effort to stay afloat. She watched as I clawed desperately at the water, unable to manage more than a few seconds before starting to sink beneath the surface. She watched as the ocean swallowed me, second by second. Then, mercifully, my father's hands reached under, fished me out, and handed me back up to my mother . . . who threw me back in again, and again and again, until she was convinced that I knew how to swim.

There were snakes on the island, but none poisonous. There were black widow spiders that were poisonous, but I doubt that my parents were fearful I would get killed by any of them. I mean, there were risks and there were hazards, but I could go anywhere, and I had myself as company. I knew from observation that the sapodilla tree produced fruit, plump, grayish brown, soft, juicy, and delectable, at least twice a year, and that's where the wasps' nests were that got me unexpectedly and repeatedly. I learned early that if I got up high in a sapodilla tree, rather than crawling out on limbs to see if the fruit was ripe enough to eat, I could rattle the top branches of the tree and ripe fruit would come loose from the weakened stems and fall to the ground. And then I could come down and pick it up and eat and get my stomach full. I would eat until I got a bellyache, and then I would get more of my mother's bush medicine-god-awful-tasting grass weeds or bitter roots of plants whose names I've never known or chunks of aloe vera I would have to force myself to swallow. And then I was off again looking for cocoa plums. Or standing on the rocks by the sea and fishing with a piece of thread and a straight pin that I'd bent into a hook. I did all those things, and it was fun, because on such an island poverty wasn't the depressing, soul-destroying force that it can be under other conditions.

The Measure Of A Man. Copyright © by Sidney Poitier. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction	xi
1	The Idyll	1
2	Departures	31
3	The Time of Ashes	47
4	Life in Black and White	71
5	A Patch of Blue	97
6	Why do White Folks love Sidney Poitier So?	117
7	Destruction of Resurrection?	139
8	Legacies	163
9	Stargazing	193
10	The Nature of Opposites	207
11	The Measure of a Man	231
	Index	245

Editorial Reviews

In this powerful book, [Poitier] shares his touchsotnes with us and makes us question what foundations guide our own lives.

Ebony

Sidney Poitier's is perhaps as influential and groundbreaking a career as any in Hollywood history. He came to New York from his boyhood home in the Bahamas and, after a rocky start, went on to star in such memorable classics as Blackboard Jungle, A Raisin in the Sun, Lillies of the Field (for which he won the Best Actor Oscar, the first ever awarded to an African American man), and To Sir, with Love, among dozens of others. In his spiritual memoir, The Measure of a Man, Poitier looks back at his pioneering life and career and the lessons learned along the way.

bn.com

[Poitier's] diction is crisp and his deep, velvety voice caresses every word.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Poitier...has wonderfully confiding tone as he begins reading what is subtitled his spiritual autobiography.

Lancaster Sunday News

If there was ever an actor whose life and work influenced his time, it was Sidney Poitier.

Richard Masur

Given the personal nature of this narrative, it's impossible to imagine hearing anyone other than Poitier, with his distinctive, resonant voice and perfect enunciation, tell the story. In his second memoir Poitier talks about his childhood in the Caribbean, where he was terribly poor by American standards, but quite happy, swimming and climbing all he could. One of eight kids, Poitier was sent to live with an older brother in Miami when he started to get into difficulties as a teen. But frustrated by his inability to earn a living and by the disparaging way whites treated him, Poitier left Miami for New York. There he worked as a dishwasher, started a drama class and launched a celebrated acting career that led to starring roles in such classics as To Sir, with Love and Raisin in the Sun. Poitier's rendition of these events is so moving that listeners will wish this audio adaptation were twice as long. Simultaneous release with the Harper San Francisco hardcover (Forecasts, May 1). (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Winner of this year's Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album, this production is a delight in every way, with the narration by Poitier appropriately dramatic and mellifluous. The story of his meteoric and fated rise to fame as a successful actor respected by his peers almost belies his hardscrabble beginnings on Cat Island off the coast of the Bahamas. And the "lucky star" Poitier falls under is actually the common denominator among all successful people: a willingness to work harder, and an innate resourcefulness, including the ability to listen to one's own instincts and to move when the time is right. If this sounds philosophical, it is; the book is much more than another celebrity memoir. It is not only Poitier's reflection on a long life in the world of arts and entertainment but also a statement of his personal views on what it means to be a good man, honed in discussions with friends and fellow travelers on life's journey who were themselves of a philosophical frame of mind. Highly recommended. Mark Pumphrey, Polk Cty. P.L., Columbus, NC Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Sidney Poitier's The Measure Of A Man is the autobiography of the only black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his outstanding performance in "Lilies of the Field" in 1963. He is also the thirty-sixth recipient of the Screen Actors Guild's Life Achievement Award for his outstanding career and humanitarian accomplishments. In The Measure Of A Man, a complete and unabridged eight-hour, 6 cassette audiobook edition narrated by Poitier, we are presented with the elements of his character and personal values that are key to his international renown both professionally and personally. His introspective examination of what the life experiences which informed his performances we are gifted with a picture of a man of truth, passion, balance, and a triumph of the spirit over a multitude of hardships and obstacles. Flawlessly produced and performed, The Measure Of A Man is "must" listening for all Sidney Poitier fans.

Poitier's second autobiography -- reflective, generous, humane -- is moving, as Poitier's memory keeps returning to the values and struggles of his parents . . ."
—The New York Times Book Review

Sayre

Reflective, generous, humane . . . moving . . .[Poitier] writes with vivid emotion.

New York Times Book Review

Revealing . . . Poitier invites us to re-examine his work and, through it, our history.

New York Times Magazine

With the unwavering sense of dignity and worth . . .this man’s authenticity is earned by the life he describes.

Los Angeles Times

An affecting new memoir.

Dallas Morning News

Reading The Measure of a Man is somewhat akin to having a worthwhile conversation with a revered older relative; he doesn’t always tell you what you want to hear, but you appreciate it just the same.

Washington Post

Having already penned a book about his professsional life, legendary actor Sidney Poitier tackles a greater subject--life itself--with this new spiritual autobiography.

American Way

Candid memoirs from teh actor who has starred in more than forty movies, directed nine, and written four.

USA Today