From Publishers Weekly
Parker, star of the 1980s TV series Simon and Simon, was shot by a crazed neighbor in Los Angeles. Although Parker recovered physically from his injuries, the incident left him psychologically crippled, prompting him and his wife, Darlene, to leave Hollywood and run a cattle and horse ranch in the California hills. The change was positive, but Parker found it difficult to return to acting and Los Angeles. He remained haunted by the memories of being shot and suffered bouts of severe depression; he even contemplated suicide. He is blunt and direct as he describes his feelings: "I am walking down the hall to shower before dinner when the panic hits me more suddenly, more unexpectedly, than a bullet. Panic is not fear. It is not an urge to run to or from anything. It is not anything external that I can deal with. It is all-consuming, blinding, maddening." Parker focuses his book primarily on his life as a rancher-how he learns all the necessary aspects of running a ranch from nursing sick animals to taming a calf and putting animals to sleep. While the writing is good overall, Parker tends to rely on quoted conversation in the early chapters. Readers interested in the rugged life of a ranch hand will find this appealing, but whether a larger audience will remember Parker as an actor and want to read about his "demons" is dubious.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Readers wondering whatever happened to Jameson Parker, one half of television's
Simon & Simon private detective team, will be pleased to know that he is alive and well and living in Southern California. Although, as he tells us in this splendidly written memoir, "alive and well" was a dicey proposition for a while: a few years after his series was canceled, Parker was shot, and very badly wounded, by a rather unpleasant neighbor. Physical recuperation went relatively smoothly, but the psychological healing is still progressing. Now living with his wife on a cattle ranch, and still taking on the infrequent acting role, Parker writes about his struggle frankly and with abundant good humor. Unlike many triumph-over-adversity books, which play the tragedy for all it's worth, this one doesn't even get around to telling us the specifics of the shooting incident until two-thirds into the book; until that point, the book is the story of an actor who went through a mostly unspecified, life-changing event and decided to chuck the big city for a ranch 5,000 feet above the San Joaquin Valley. It's a story about a stranger in a strange land, about a man learning an entirely new set of skills, and the colorful people he meets along the way. Thousands of actors have written memoirs, but this one is unlike all the others. It isn't the actor's celebrity that makes it fascinating, but the way he tells his story.
David PittCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
