LeVar Burton taught a generation of kids to love books on Reading Rainbow, but he wasn’t the first Burton in the education business. His memoir, Take My Word for It, published November 10, 2026, by Random House, honors the people who shaped him, and several of them made their living in a classroom.
The 352-page book, written with Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts, covers the three roles most people know him for: Kunta Kinte in Roots, Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation and the host of Reading Rainbow. The family story underneath is less familiar.
A great-grandfather who opened a school
When the memoir was first announced in 2024, Burton told PEOPLE that his grandfather, Aaron C. Burton, and his great-grandfather, Pearl B. Burton, were both school superintendents. According to the magazine, Pearl helped open a public school for Black children in Osceola, Arkansas, at a time when about 20% of the state’s Black population was illiterate.
“I feel a tremendous responsibility because of [my ancestors’] sacrifices,” Burton said at the time.
The pattern continued closer to home. Burton was born in West Germany, where his father was serving in the U.S. Army, and grew up in Sacramento, California, with his mother, Erma, and two sisters. In a July 2026 interview with AARP, he said his mother was the first person in her family to graduate from college and began her career as an English teacher. His older sister, her two daughters and his son all work in education.
“I am too; I just have a different classroom,” he told AARP.
The priesthood plan that never happened
That classroom almost looked very different. Burton, now 69, told PEOPLE this week that he had been on track to become a priest since childhood. A part in a senior-year high school production of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral changed his mind.
He was a student at the University of Southern California when he landed Roots at 19, his first professional acting job. Burton told PEOPLE the role is what made him feel the need to connect with his ancestors, the same thread that runs through the new book.
When the Reading Rainbow kids grew up
Burton hosted Reading Rainbow from 1983 until the original show ended in 2006. He told PEOPLE he only understood its reach once its first viewers grew up and started thanking him. At that point, he said, it stopped being about him and became about what he could give people he never met.
Start with the audiobook if you can, because Burton narrates his own story himself.
