What do you think?
Rate this book
Son of Junkman: My Life from the West Bottoms of Kansas City to the Bright Lights of Hollywood
Emmy Award-winning actor, Ed Asner, recounts tales from his amazing life in this charming and hilarious memoir. From his colorful childhood as the son of a junkman growing up in the West Bottoms of Kansas City all the way through his spectacular acting career during the golden age of film and television, Ed recounts warm memories that are anything but ordinary. Son of a Junkman makes the reader feel as if they've pulled up a chair in Ed's home just in time to catch the loveable Hollywood grump tell a story or two. Foreword by Paul Rudd.
158 pages, Paperback
Published January 15, 2020
About the author
Ed Asner
83 books53 followersEdward Asner was an American film and television actor and former President of the Screen Actors Guild, primarily known for his role as Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spin-off series, Lou Grant. More recently, he provided the voice of Granny Goodness in various Justice Leaguecartoons and Carl Fredricksen in Pixar's Up.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 3, 2020
There's less than 100 pages by Asner, who focuses mostly on his childhood family with very little about his career beyond stating a few facts. He didn't even take the time to look things up online to help recall some of his great performances, so he is unsure about what roles he played or what the names of some productions are. Then halfway through the book he gets political and it goes downhill from there.
We want to hear about Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant, and Roots. There's not much about any of them beyond typical praise of co-stars. He does clearly show a lack of affection for Moore, who he says he was jealous of and didn't seem chummy with. In terms of his own spin-off, he again repeats the standard line that it was cancelled due to his leftist communist-supporting views, when in truth it was at the end of its fifth season, had dropped dramatically in the ratings, and wasn't in the top thirty of all TV shows. He needs to accept that shows get cancelled due to ratings direction and Lou Grant was dropping fast. In terms of Roots there's pretty much nothing.
Asner then repeatedly makes false claims he was "blacklisted" after Lou Grant was cancelled, saying that for two decades he couldn't get work. I checked his IMDb and he had almost 100 roles from 1982 to 2000, including a half dozen series where he was a regular! He also says he was never a "Hollywood insider"--this was the guy who headed the union of 50,000 actors! Asner seems to have no true sense of self and the book becomes his attempt to present an unrealistic image.
I appreciate his humility in admitting that he cheated on his wife and that he has made mistakes, wishing he could do things over. But some of those things he apologizes for don't include his irrational political thoughts or his hot-headed reputation on TV sets. He even goes so far as to claim that he was never the grouch that almost everyone has claimed him to be.
Then when the book is supposedly done at page 94, a "co-author" interview with Asner is printed that takes up 40 pages. But it's an incredibly inept, poorly handled interview by a "writer" who did no research on Asner, simply went through his IMDb role list, and was unprepared, sounding stupid asking Asner about projects that the writer wasn't familiar with. And during the interview Asner comes across as grouchy or offended, with many one-line answers.
It's nice to have anything on paper about this great actor, but Asner really doesn't know how to tell a story based on either section of the book, or he's just too old to remember. Mostly he is talking about being an insecure junkman's kid, looking for his dad's affirmation or hoping for a reunion with his ex-wife. It should have instead been full of career stories from his great legacy on screen.
We want to hear about Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant, and Roots. There's not much about any of them beyond typical praise of co-stars. He does clearly show a lack of affection for Moore, who he says he was jealous of and didn't seem chummy with. In terms of his own spin-off, he again repeats the standard line that it was cancelled due to his leftist communist-supporting views, when in truth it was at the end of its fifth season, had dropped dramatically in the ratings, and wasn't in the top thirty of all TV shows. He needs to accept that shows get cancelled due to ratings direction and Lou Grant was dropping fast. In terms of Roots there's pretty much nothing.
Asner then repeatedly makes false claims he was "blacklisted" after Lou Grant was cancelled, saying that for two decades he couldn't get work. I checked his IMDb and he had almost 100 roles from 1982 to 2000, including a half dozen series where he was a regular! He also says he was never a "Hollywood insider"--this was the guy who headed the union of 50,000 actors! Asner seems to have no true sense of self and the book becomes his attempt to present an unrealistic image.
I appreciate his humility in admitting that he cheated on his wife and that he has made mistakes, wishing he could do things over. But some of those things he apologizes for don't include his irrational political thoughts or his hot-headed reputation on TV sets. He even goes so far as to claim that he was never the grouch that almost everyone has claimed him to be.
Then when the book is supposedly done at page 94, a "co-author" interview with Asner is printed that takes up 40 pages. But it's an incredibly inept, poorly handled interview by a "writer" who did no research on Asner, simply went through his IMDb role list, and was unprepared, sounding stupid asking Asner about projects that the writer wasn't familiar with. And during the interview Asner comes across as grouchy or offended, with many one-line answers.
It's nice to have anything on paper about this great actor, but Asner really doesn't know how to tell a story based on either section of the book, or he's just too old to remember. Mostly he is talking about being an insecure junkman's kid, looking for his dad's affirmation or hoping for a reunion with his ex-wife. It should have instead been full of career stories from his great legacy on screen.
December 2, 2021
I finished reading “Son of a Junkman: My Life from the West Bottoms of Kansas City to the Bright Lights of Hollywood” (2020) by Ed Asner with Samuel Warren Joseph and Matthew Seymour. It has a Foreword by Paul Rudd, who appeared with Asner in 2012 in the Broadway play, “Grace”.
Ed Asner, who just passed away at the age of 91 on August 29, 2021, will forever be remembered as the blustery television news producer, Lou Grant, from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (1970-1977) and the dramatic hour-long spin-off, “Lou Grant” (1977-1982, in which Lou Grant returns to his roots as a newspaper editor). Younger generations will probably recognize his voice as that of Carl Fredricksen on the Disney•Pixar animated movie “Up” (2009), and he also made a very memorable appearance as Santa Clause in the 2003 Will Ferrell Christmas movie, “Elf”.
Asner did much more than those things in his very long career in live theatre, film, and television of course, much of which is at least touched upon in this book.
I enjoyed reading of his early years in Kansas City and his relationship with his family (parents, siblings, uncles, grandfather, etc.). At details what it was like growing up in a Jewish family at that time and his regret that his father died long before he could see his son’s success as an actor.
He discussed how he got into acting (live theater), then into movies and television. He has stories of working with legendary actors like John Wayne, Marlon Brando, and Sidney Poitier, and on two movies with Elvis Presley.
He talks of his many guest appearances and recurring roles on television prior to getting the role of Lou Grant.
He then has separate chapters on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Lou Grant”. These two chapters are way too brief though, in my opinion, and this is the arguably the most memorable role of his career, but they are only eight and five pages long. Then, again, this is a very short book in general, only 143 pages (only the first 94 pages of which are actually the autobiography; the rest of the book are additional interview transcripts between Asner and co-author Samuel Warren Joseph).
Following the chapters on “MTM” and “Lou Grant”, Asner discusses his time as Screen Actors Guild president and his at that time controversial remarks that he made in regards to the civil war going on in El Salvador, remarks that labelled him in the eyes of many as being pro-Communism and that he believed to his dying day as having caused the cancellation of “Lou Grant” while it was still doing decently well in the ratings and a long period in which he was basically blacklisted and could get very little television or film work (the second half of the 1980s, 1990s, and at least early 2000s).
He finally comes out of this fallow period (which was very hard on him emotionally as he loved his craft, acting) with those breakthrough parts in “Elf” and “Up”. He also started getting television guest roles again and also returned to live theater.
As I mentioned, the first 94 pages are the autobiography and the remaining almost fifty pages are additional interview transcripts. As Samuel Warren Joseph accounts in his introduction to those transcripts, his first draft with Asner was formatted as “an oral autobiography” (more interview style, I gather), but that Asner decided he preferred a more standard autobiography format, which co-author Matthew Seymour “reshaped and rewrote” along with Asner, resulting in this version published as this book.
It is a very interesting read, albeit a short one, one which left me wanting more. Perhaps Asner intended to do a follow up book going more into his biggest roles, I don’t know. I do know that he was a very engaging storyteller as demonstrated here in his autobiography and also on his many appearances on radio shows and podcasts over the past few years like Ed Robertson’s “TV Confidential” and Stu Shostak’s “Stu’s Show”.
For fans of his work, like me, he is already sorely missed and I highly recommend “Son of a Junkman”.
Ed Asner, who just passed away at the age of 91 on August 29, 2021, will forever be remembered as the blustery television news producer, Lou Grant, from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (1970-1977) and the dramatic hour-long spin-off, “Lou Grant” (1977-1982, in which Lou Grant returns to his roots as a newspaper editor). Younger generations will probably recognize his voice as that of Carl Fredricksen on the Disney•Pixar animated movie “Up” (2009), and he also made a very memorable appearance as Santa Clause in the 2003 Will Ferrell Christmas movie, “Elf”.
Asner did much more than those things in his very long career in live theatre, film, and television of course, much of which is at least touched upon in this book.
I enjoyed reading of his early years in Kansas City and his relationship with his family (parents, siblings, uncles, grandfather, etc.). At details what it was like growing up in a Jewish family at that time and his regret that his father died long before he could see his son’s success as an actor.
He discussed how he got into acting (live theater), then into movies and television. He has stories of working with legendary actors like John Wayne, Marlon Brando, and Sidney Poitier, and on two movies with Elvis Presley.
He talks of his many guest appearances and recurring roles on television prior to getting the role of Lou Grant.
He then has separate chapters on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Lou Grant”. These two chapters are way too brief though, in my opinion, and this is the arguably the most memorable role of his career, but they are only eight and five pages long. Then, again, this is a very short book in general, only 143 pages (only the first 94 pages of which are actually the autobiography; the rest of the book are additional interview transcripts between Asner and co-author Samuel Warren Joseph).
Following the chapters on “MTM” and “Lou Grant”, Asner discusses his time as Screen Actors Guild president and his at that time controversial remarks that he made in regards to the civil war going on in El Salvador, remarks that labelled him in the eyes of many as being pro-Communism and that he believed to his dying day as having caused the cancellation of “Lou Grant” while it was still doing decently well in the ratings and a long period in which he was basically blacklisted and could get very little television or film work (the second half of the 1980s, 1990s, and at least early 2000s).
He finally comes out of this fallow period (which was very hard on him emotionally as he loved his craft, acting) with those breakthrough parts in “Elf” and “Up”. He also started getting television guest roles again and also returned to live theater.
As I mentioned, the first 94 pages are the autobiography and the remaining almost fifty pages are additional interview transcripts. As Samuel Warren Joseph accounts in his introduction to those transcripts, his first draft with Asner was formatted as “an oral autobiography” (more interview style, I gather), but that Asner decided he preferred a more standard autobiography format, which co-author Matthew Seymour “reshaped and rewrote” along with Asner, resulting in this version published as this book.
It is a very interesting read, albeit a short one, one which left me wanting more. Perhaps Asner intended to do a follow up book going more into his biggest roles, I don’t know. I do know that he was a very engaging storyteller as demonstrated here in his autobiography and also on his many appearances on radio shows and podcasts over the past few years like Ed Robertson’s “TV Confidential” and Stu Shostak’s “Stu’s Show”.
For fans of his work, like me, he is already sorely missed and I highly recommend “Son of a Junkman”.
June 8, 2020
I have always been a fan of Ed Asner. I saw him do an interview where he talked about the book. I asked at the library for the book last day before the library went under the shelter in place order. They did not own the book but would put in a request to the powers that be. I was very excited to get an email this week that the book was in and I would be the first to receive it! I picked it up from the table by the door. It was a delightful light hearted read.
July 21, 2020
I enjoyed watching Ed Asner on "They Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Lou Grant" when I was growing up.
A clever, well-written memoir of his life.
A clever, well-written memoir of his life.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews