What I Know for Sure: My Story of Growing Up in America » (Reprint)

Tavis Smiley is the host of PBS's The Tavis Smiley Show. He also appears as a regular commentator on Tom Joyner's top-rated ABC radio show. He is the author of such bestsellers as Hard Left, Doing What's Right, How to Make Black America Better, and Keeping the Faith.

David Ritz has written biographies of, among others, Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, and B. B. King. His latest book, Messengers: Portraits of African American Ministers, was published in 2006.

From the man who catapulted the Covenant with Black America to number one on the New York Times bestseller list comes a searing memoir of poverty, ambition, pain and atonment.

Tavis Smiley grew up in a family of thirteen in rural Indian, where money was scarce and the sight of other black faces even scarcer. Always an outsider because of his race, economic background, and Pentecostal religious beliefs, he was sustained by his family’s love. But one day his world was shattered when his father brutally beat him, sending him to the hospital and then into foster care for a period of time. In What I Know for Sure, Smiley recounts how he overcame his painful history and became one of America’s most popular media figures.

The New York Times - Lawrence Downes

However Smiley s story strikes you, as a tale of stellar achievement or a physics lesson in the buoyancy properties of limitless self-regard, he is without doubt a natural at what he does. Incessant talkers often reveal far more of themselves than they mean to, and silent readers of this book can fill in a lot of gaps. When you add up all the boasting, the relentlessly upbeat bromides, the breathless celebrity encounters and the earnest litany of injustices suffered and hurdles overcome, you get an entirely plausible, unwittingly honest portrait of a natural-born talk-show host, and how he got that way.