Harry Belafonte’s 1956 album Calypso made him the first artist in
history to sell more than one million LPs. He won both a Tony Award
and an Emmy, and he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by
President Clinton. He served as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and is
the recipient of Kennedy Center Honors for excellence in the
performing arts. He died in 2023.
Michael Shnayerson, a longtime contributing editor to Vanity Fair,
is the author of Irwin Shaw; The Car That Could; The Killers
Within, coauthored with Mark J. Plotkin, and Coal River, which
recounted the efforts of Appalachian lawyers and grassroots
groups to stop the devastating practice of mountaintop coal
removal in southern West Virginia. Shnayerson’s passion for those
environmental activists was one reason Harry Belafonte chose him to
collaborate on his autobiography. Shnayerson lives in
Bridgehampton, New York, with his daughter, Jenna.
“An honest, in many ways important and genuinely revelatory
autobiography. . . . My Song reveals, Belafonte was more than
celebrity eye candy, burnishing his image with a little politically
correct politicking. He not only talked the talk, but walked the
walk. . . . My Song is more than fitting denouement for a life well
lived.” —Curt Schleier, Seattle Times
“In My Song, a brave and spellbinding memoir written with Vanity
Fair contributing editor Michael Shnayerson, Belafonte tells a
sweeping story . . . riveting . . . In these days of national and
global uncertainty, with the numbers of poor steadily rising, there
are lessons aplenty in the life of Harry Belafonte, as told in this
surprising and revelatory book.” —Wil Haygood, Washington Post
“ . . . engrossing autobiographical account of a life devoted in
equal parts to entertainment and social causes. My Song is rich
with vivid scenes of Belafonte working as an adviser, mediator,
fundraiser and implementer with such players as John and Robert
Kennedy and King.” —Tom Nolan, San Francisco Chronicle
“Here is a gorgeous account of the large life of a Harlem boy . . .
Scenes of extravagant waste, scenes of righteous anger—rich
contradictions abound—with little attempt to explain them away, a
mark of the honest autobiographer.” —Garrison Keillor, New York
Times Book Review
“Absorbing . . .” —Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, New York
“To read Harry Belafonte's new memoir, My Song, is to discover a
man who has packed enough life for 10 people into 84 years.”
—“Morning Edition,” NPR
“Somewhere amid the accounts of when he became the first artist to
sell a million copies of an album, the first black leading actor to
romance a white leading actress in a major Hollywood film, and the
man who was asked to help pick out the clothes that Martin Luther
King Jr. would be buried in, you realize just how extraordinary
Harry Belafonte’s life has been. If Belafonte had simply pursued
one strand of that life - the immensely popular singer, the Tony
Award-winning actor, the powerful political and social activist -
it would have made fascinating material for a book. That he managed
to cram all three into his 84 years makes My Song, his captivating
memoir written with Michael Shnayerson, not only a sometimes
exhausting chronicle of Belafonte’s own story but an intriguing
look at US history from the late ’40s to the present. . . . One of
the book’s triumphs involves the way Belafonte and Shnayerson
manage to capture Belafonte’s distinctive voice . . . You can
almost hear him narrate the story in his stately rasp.” —Sarah
Rodman, The Boston Globe
“Bracingly opinionated autobiography from an American original,
still provocative in his ninth decade.” —Kirkus (starred)
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