cover image A Golden Voice: How Faith, Hard Work, and Humility Brought Me from the Streets to Salvation

A Golden Voice: How Faith, Hard Work, and Humility Brought Me from the Streets to Salvation

Ted Williams, with Bret Witter. Gotham, $26 (256p) ISBN 978-1-592-40714-9

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. (June)