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Ballantine
May 2009
On Sale: April 28, 2009
272 pages ISBN: 0345506553 EAN: 9780345506559 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
What would my mother say? How would she want me to handle
this situation? How can I make this tough decision and stay
true to myself?
What would my mother say?
Sam
Haskell still asks himself these questions every
day.
When Haskell was young, his devoted mother,
Mary, instilled in her son the values of character, faith,
and honor by setting an example and asking him to promise to
live his life according to her lessons. He did, and those
promises have served Haskell consistently from his
Mississippi boyhood to his long career at the venerable
William Morris Agency in Beverly Hills.
In this
inspiring memoir full of touching stories and amusing
anecdotes, Haskell reveals how he kept his pledge to his
mother to live a decent life–even in the shark-infested
waters of Hollywood, where he handled the hottest stars and
packaged the highest-rated shows–by refusing to become the
cliché of an amoral agent. Here is Haskell as a child in
Amory, Mississippi (pop. 7,000), discovering the power of
hope as he waits for an unlikely visit from the “Cheer Man”
(a representative of the detergent company who gave ten
dollars to anyone using the brand), learning humility after
pursuing an eighth-grade “Good Citizenship” award he cockily
assumed he’d win, confronting the complications of human
character when a near-fatal car crash exposed his judgmental
father’s true nature.
Years later, in Hollywood,
Haskell would rely on his mother’s teachings–honesty,
self-reliance, and belief in God–as he swiftly rose from the
William Morris mailroom to eventually become the company’s
Worldwide Head of Television. His capacity for friendship
and his insistence on living his version of the Golden Rule
(being “thoughtfully political”) allowed him to handle
various client crises and the tense negotiations that nearly
scuttled the last years of Everybody Loves Raymond
and the entire existence of The Fresh Prince of
Bel-Air.
Haskell has achieved success through
self-respect, and from his story we learn how we, too, can
maintain our dignity when faced with life’s challenges. This
stirring memoir is a testament to mothers everywhere who
instill in their sons the lasting values they need to become
good men and devoted fathers.
From the
Hardcover edition.
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