Newman at his best.

An odd duck of a book — welcome, but odd.

The show is a lot more satisfying than the book.

Relatively slender in girth, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man is perhaps the least mediated and most conflicted part of the whole renaissance because it bears within it all the riven emotions its subject might be expected to feel at its release.

I have to admit, I read Paul Newman’s autobiography...with a sinking heart, partly because I had a feeling that what I was reading wasn’t the book Newman had in mind when, over a five-year period, he and his screenwriter friend Stewart Stern recorded many hours of conversations about Paul’s life. Nor, I feared, was it the book that David Rosenthal envisioned.

Stunning.

... far more than a celebrity biopic. Newman’s narrative dominates, but commentary and anecdotes from his co-writer and friend Stewart Stern, other luminaries of the movie business, friends and Newman’s own family make this loosely chronological treatment of the legendary film star unusually compelling.

Gripping.

Movie stars, bemused by their own magnified faces, don’t usually have much interest in self-analysis. Paul Newman turns out to be the ruthlessly candid exception.

Raw, honest, and revealing.

Reflective.

Sharp, acerbic, often somber.

This unforgettable and extraordinary memoir, one of the best and most compelling books of 2022, is a breathtakingly honest mea culpa from a complicated man striving to excavate his demons; according to Newman's daughter Clea, who writes the memoir's afterword, he succeeded in his final decades..

In many ways this memoir is incomplete, but it’s never not psychologically fascinating — a compelling insight into how profoundly right Philip Larkin was about the power of bad parents..

Raw.

Newman’s story unfolds in a humble, sometimes humorous narrative voice.