Cosby: His Life and Times by Mark Whitaker is a very good and thorough biography of a fascinating man. It grounds Cosby's life and work in his roots growing up in poverty, his family, his love of jazz and art, and shines an important light on his great humanitarian efforts.

It manages to be sympathetic without becoming hagiographic, critical but not muck-raking.

If I have one major source of disappointment in this biography, it's that I hoped for a more critical exploration of the controversial and outspoken comments that Cosby has made in recent years regarding race relations in this country and the problems faced by black Americans.

Clearly, there's backstory and nuance underlying these comments which was largely missing in the press coverage at the time. Mr. Whitaker relates this backstory in detail and provides a needed nuance to our understanding of Cosby's opinions. Knowing this backstory helps us to see that Cosby's opinions on this subject aren't as extremist and out-of-touch as he was portrayed in the media when he made them. It's also important to note that Cosby has done a great deal of admirable boots-on-the-ground work to address these problems—he's not just a talking head.

Contrast this controversy with the essentially important influence that Cosby's television shows had on race relations during the latter half of the 20th century, and it's clear that he has been an overall force for good in our culture.

At the same time, I feel that this book is occasionally a bit too apologetic. At times, I feel that Mr. Whitaker isn't quite critical enough, that he glosses over Cosby's flaws a bit too glibly.

Stylistically, I found the work quite engrossing and readable. I think Mr. Whitaker uses a few too many exclamation marks for a serious biography and he tries too hard to end his chapters with dramatic cliffhangers.

He tends to build up stories from Cosby's life a bit too much. He creates dramatic introductions to tales which then turn out to be anticlimactic in their ordinariness.

Aside from Mr. Whitaker's slightly over-inflated sense of drama and slightly too uncritical portrayal, Cosby is a highly informative work and a worthy treatment of an important entertainer and humanitarian.

NOTE: The word "humanitarian" is loaded when it comes to the subject of Bill Cosby. It's widely known that several women have accused Cosby of rape and sexual assault, a pattern of reported incidents dating back into the 1980's. There was a civil suit in 2004 that was settled out of court, but never any criminal charges against him.

In this context, calling Cosby a humanitarian is problematic.

Mr. Whitaker makes no mention of these rape and assault accusations in his book, despite them being common knowledge. I'm curious to know why he chose to omit this. These allegations haven't been proven in a court of law but they're far better attested and more substantive than mere gossip. The absence of this aspect of Cosby's life is glaring.

Given the omission of this information from the book, I remain unsure of how to address this issue in this book review.

I also recognize that Cosby has done great work to assist Americans living in poverty and has provided tremendous support to education throughout his life. It's for those reasons that the word "humanitarian" applies. ( )

Good book detailing the life of Bill Cosby, read as a free copy won from a Goodreads contest. It gave memorable stories as well as some bad things about Bill Cosby, that at times seemed to overcome the good. Overall an interesting look into the life of a famous person. ( )

ARC provided by NetGalley

This is one of those books that is difficult to review, because real life events showed up and broke the facade that many readers have of Bill Cosby. While Whitaker does an excellent job of discussing Cosby’s role and influence on modern comedy and his upbringing and early life, he neglects or writes off many of the allegations such as rape, affairs, gambling problems, and illegitimate children. While the last three are mentioned, briefly, Cosby still comes off looking like a saint and a hero that he was once viewed as.

It is never an easy thing to write a book about someone that has had a prominent voice and an almost fatherly figure for so many, that has faltered and fallen from the pedestal. And Whitaker fails to capture Cosby as a real person, outside of his comedy, and thus doesn’t really give us a full picture of him. As such this is only half of a biography and the rest will have to be written at a later date, by someone that never had him on that pedestal. 2.5 out of 5 stars. ( )

Both fiction and non-fiction have their own set of “rules” which needs to be followed in order to make the final product successful.

While fiction can be anything/everything an author creates through the use of mere words; non-fiction can be not only rather dull to write, it can be quite boring to read; just recall the textbooks you needed to read in high school and college, containing one boring fact after another. And of all the various non-fiction subject matters an author can write about, biographies tend be the most daunting, especially if you want to do it well and not lose your audience’s interest in the process.

A person’s life is merely a collection of minutia of personal data; and this is where almost all biographers, in my opinion, fail in presenting this data to their readers in a manner which is not only informative but also entertaining.

Mark Whitaker, on the other, has succeeded in presenting an extensively researched biography of one of America’s best beloved entertainers, Bill Cosby. Mr. Whitaker, it becomes quite apparent as one reads this biography, uses his years of experience of being a reporter and editor at Newsweek, as well that of being the managing editor at CNN to create the work he has produced here.

The episodic approach used in writing this biography makes it read more like a novel than a biography, as each chapter of this book takes us through another phase in the life of Bill Cosby.

Mark Whitaker’s use of the reminiscences of Mr. Cosby and his friends and family, coupled with countless hours of research, followed by the apparent arduous task of gleaning all the information he’s collected into this book, makes each chapter come alive. Each chapter could have been viewed as an item on CNN.

In reviewing this book I feel it is more notable to concentrate on the attributes of the book itself rather than to dwell on any particular portion of the extraordinary life of Bill Crosby.

“COSBY – His Life and Times” by Mark Whitaker is a definite MUST READ for all those who have admired and appreciated any of the work Mr. Crosby has done, as not only as an entertainer or author, but as an educator and humanitarian as well.

I’m therefore not hesitating in giving this book the 5 STARS it so richly deserves.

Please note I had received an early release copy of the final hardcover book through a giveaway drawing on GoodReads; and that the above has been my honest opinion of the book.

Robin Leigh Morgan is the self-published author of “I Kissed a Ghost,” a MG/YA Paranormal romance novel. ( )

Basically, I was THOROUGHLY caught up in this book. It's a long read, over 500 pages but completely worth it. The author based this book mostly on information he retrieved from articles, previous interviews from Cosby, and interviews from many people who know him. He only spent about 5 hours talking to Cosby, in bits and pieces, mostly over the phone. And Cosby read the final draft. Not only chronicling Cosby's life, he also places that life in the context of the times, including types of comedians, show business and the television industry, and racism. He talks about Cosby's style of comedic delivery, and that he never used a "canned" routine. Whitaker compares Cosby's comedy to Jazz, that Cosby would just riff on a theme in his laid back easy style and just seemed to enchant people of all races..I found it fascinating that there was so much back story of he and his wife's family, his friendship with Robert Culp, and other media stars and how the movie and tv industry worked. The author talks about Cosby's continuing philanthropy of historic black colleges and education standards for the poor. Also, of interest is knowing those comedic stars that he influenced, among them Jerry Seinfield and Ray Romano. The author notes that Chris Rock says that he was turned on to Cosby by Eddie Murphy who told him that if he ever wanted to be a comedian he needed to listen to Cosby's album "To Russell my brother, whom I slept with." The author does not ignore Cosby's human faults, and even Cosby doesn't want to dwell on them, but they are noted. This has become one of my favorite all time books, ....and now I'm going to find all my old Cosby recordings and play them again. I encourage you to do the same. ( )