A Golden Voice

April 30, 2012
Homeless in 2011, ex–radio announcer Williams, aka “The Man with the Golden Voice,” found overnight fame when a video of him holding a cardboard sign and panhandling on a street corner went viral. Within days, Williams was a guest on major network talk shows and juggling job offers, with the original video scoring more than 40 million hits in the months that followed. But during the 20 years that crack cocaine was Williams’s “constant companion,” his life was a raw wound. Teaming with bestselling author Witter (Dewey: The Small Town Library Cat Who Touched a Nation), he documents peaks, pitfalls, wild ways, a failed marriage, self-destruction, depression, drugs, thefts, arrests, backsliding, and rehab. Born and raised in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Army was his ticket out of the projects. On Columbus, Ohio, radio stations in the 1980s, he used his voice “to make it feel like a nonstop party for a million people” and became the area’s charismatic popular DJ despite heavy drinking. Going into a downward spiral, he lived in shelters, crack houses, and the street. In the woods behind a grocery store, his home was a tent he made by taping children’s raincoats together. The notion of a “second chance at life” generated a huge interest in Williams, and those who followed last year’s media accounts of his struggles will appreciate the insights and brutal honesty expressed in this powerful career comeback story.

April 15, 2012
A captivating memoir about a man's life of drug addiction and homelessness. With the assistance of veteran co-author Witter (co-author: Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him, 2011, etc.), Williams tells the story of how he reached his childhood dream of becoming a radio voice and subsequently lost it through his addiction to crack. The author's obsession with becoming a radio voice started at age 10 when his mother bought him a radio. He idolized Hank Spann and learned the voice-inflection techniques from the on-air personalities of the time. Williams knew he had the gift of a "golden voice" from childhood, but he enlisted in the Army after graduation. When he was dishonorably discharged for black-marketing electronic equipment, he found a job as a DJ at a radio station in Chadbourn, N.C. He later became a radio personality and town celebrity in Columbus, Ohio, until he became addicted to crack and quit his job to spend all day smoking. The rest of the memoir follows his life as an addict, homeless person and absentee father. The grimy details of crack houses and harsh aspects of homeless life add color to the story, as do the pages written in the voice of his girlfriend Kathy. The writing style is fast-paced and easy to follow despite the whirlwind of events, and Williams does not shy away from self-criticism. Religion becomes a main theme toward the end of the book, as the author claims it was God who ultimately led to his freedom and sobriety. The story ends just before his rise to fame and does not explore his life after he became a national sensation. Disturbing and hard to put down.

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April 15, 2012
Will talk for food. Not the typical street-sign plea for help, but, then again, Williams wasn't the typical homeless panhandler. Once one of the most recognizable and vibrant radio personalities in Columbus, Ohio, Williams plummeted from the pinnacle of fame to the pits of degradation when he became a crack addict. He suffered a litany of losses, from his home and family to his career and, most critically, his self-respect. With nothing other than his trademark golden voice to barter for the money he needed to survive on the streets, and feed his habit, Williams planted himself at a busy intersection and hoped someone would notice. The YouTube video of Williams making good on his sign's promise immediately went viral, and suddenly Williams was back in the spotlight. In stark, unflinching terms, Williams, with assistance from Witter (Dewey: The True Story of a World-Famous Library Cat, 2010), tells the story of how he won and lost his own version of the American dream, describing his crippling addiction through often uncomfortably graphic episodes of utter degeneration and despair.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)