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Summary
Summary
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
The first comprehensive, authoritative biography of American icon Arthur Ashe--the Jackie Robinson of men's tennis--a pioneering athlete who, after breaking the color barrier, went on to become an influential civil rights activist and public intellectual.
Born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1943, by the age of eleven, Arthur Ashe was one of the state's most talented black tennis players. Jim Crow restrictions barred Ashe from competing with whites. Still, in 1960 he won the National Junior Indoor singles title, which led to a tennis scholarship at UCLA. He became the first African American to play for the US Davis Cup team in 1963, and two years later he won the NCAA singles championship. In 1968, he won both the US Amateur title and the first US Open title, rising to a number one national ranking. Turning professional in 1969, he soon became one of the world's most successful tennis stars, winning the Australian Open in 1970 and Wimbledon in 1975. After retiring in 1980, he served four years as the US Davis Cup captain and was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1985.
In this revelatory biography, Raymond Arsenault chronicles Ashe's rise to stardom on the court. But much of the book explores his off-court career as a human rights activist, philanthropist, broadcaster, writer, businessman, and celebrity. In the 1970s and 1980s, Ashe gained renown as an advocate for sportsmanship, education, racial equality, and the elimination of apartheid in South Africa. But from 1979 on, he was forced to deal with a serious heart condition that led to multiple surgeries and blood transfusions, one of which left him HIV-positive. In 1988, after completing a three-volume history of African-American athletes, he was diagnosed with AIDS, a condition he revealed only four years later. After devoting the last ten months of his life to AIDS activism, he died in February 1993 at the age of forty-nine, leaving an inspiring legacy of dignity, integrity, and active citizenship.
Based on prodigious research, including more than one hundred interviews, Raymond Arsenault's insightful and compelling biography puts Ashe in the context of both his time and the long struggle of African-American athletes seeking equal opportunity and respect.
Author Notes
Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. One of the nation's leading civil rights historians, he is the author of several acclaimed and prize-winning books, including Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice and The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The first black superstar in men's tennis makes a significant mark off the court in this inspiring but staid biography. Historian Arsenault (Freedom Riders) follows Ashe's career through epochal shifts in tennis and society as Ashe practiced on segregated courts in Virginia in the 1950s, matured as the sport opened fully to African-Americans in the 1960s, then became an antiapartheid activist and integrated the South African Open in 1973 to acclaim, but also complaints that he should have boycotted it instead. He also navigated tennis's transition from amateur pastime to big-money, big-ego spectacle, helping to found a players' union but mourning the erosion of the sport's genteel manners, which he stoutly upheld. Ashe even made his untimely death from AIDS serve a purpose by raising awareness of the disease. Arsenault's narrative is well-researched and exciting in a few on-court showdowns and political confrontations, but for most of its great length Ashe is such an unflagging paragon of sportsmanship and social responsibility that he comes across as rather bland. It's only with the appearance of Jimmy Connors, whom Ashe beat for the Wimbledon title, and John McEnroe, whom he coached on the Davis Cup team, that drama erupts as the two foul-mouthed, tantrum-throwing divas ruffle Ashe's decorum. Readers will find his saga admirable, but not very taut. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Historian Arsenault's biography of tennis star Arthur Ashe, still the only African American male to win a Wimbledon, U. S. Open, and Australian singles title, focuses not on his subject's success on the court but, rather, on his rich and varied, if sadly short, life outside of tennis his upbringing in Richmond, Virginia; his complex personality; his civil rights activism; his philanthropy; his legacy; and, of course, his health (a serious heart condition led to his contracting HIV from a blood transfusion). The lack of coverage of Ashe's tennis career may well be appropriate, given Ashe's accomplishments in the wider world, but it will strike many readers as surprising. Still, Arsenault justifies his approach by vividly describing Ashe's significant role in international geopolitics (particularly in South Africa), in AIDS activism, in campaigning for racial equality in all aspects of society, and more. Ashe accomplished much with a tennis racket in his hand, but Arsenault, to his credit, succeeds in showing that this tennis star's life was only beginning when he left the game.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE SPLINTERING OF THE AMERICAN MIND: Identity Politics, Inequality, and Community on Today's College Campuses, by William Egginton. (Bloomsbury, $28.) Egginton, a professor at Johns Hopkins, regards the often militant discourse around identity with sympathy and concern. THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. (Penguin Press, $28.) Expanding on their influential Atlantic article, the authors trace the culture of "safetyism" on campus to a generation convinced of its own fragility, warning of potentially dire consequences for democracy. IDENTITY: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, by Francis Fukuyama. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) In a sympathetic analysis of identity politics, Fukuyama argues that the sense of being dismissed, rather than material interest, is the current locomotive of human affairs. THE LIES THAT BIND: Rethinking Identity: Creed, Country, Color, Class, Culture, by Kwame Anthony Appiah. (Liveright, $27.95.) Appiah, a cosmopolitan by background and choice, says that we tend to think of ourselves as part of monolithic tribes up against other tribes, whereas we each contain multitudes. ARTHUR ASHE: A Life, by Raymond Arsenault. (Simon & Schuster, $37.50.) This first major biography of the great tennis champion, written by a civil rights historian, shows that Ashe's activism was as important as his athletic skill. He belongs on the Mount Rushmore of elite sports figures who changed America. DEAD GIRLS: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession, by Alice Bolin. (Morrow/HarperCollins, paper, $15.99.) Bolin's stylish and inspired collection centers on the figure - ubiquitous in police procedurals from "Twin Peaks" to "True Detective" - of the "dead girl," a character who represents a dominant American fantasy, inciting desire and rage in equal measure. THIS MOURNABLE BODY, by Tsitsi Dangarembga. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) In this accomplished sequel to "Nervous Conditions," her prize winning debut of 30 years ago, Dangarembga, a Zimbabwean author and filmmaker, finds her indomitable heroine, Tambu, single, middle-aged and unemployed but unbowed. NOTES FROM THE FOG: Stories, by Ben Marcus. (Knopf, $26.95.) In his latest collection, the ever inventive Marcus delivers taut, bleak, dystopian stories that are disturbing and outlandish yet somehow eminently plausible. MARWAN'S JOURNEY, by Patricia de Arias. Illustrated by Laura Borras. (MinEdition, $17.99; ages 5 to 7.) This sensitive, beautifully illustrated tale of a boy's journey across a desert, away from his war-torn homeland, ends with safety and dreams of return. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Kirkus Review
A well-informed doorstop biography of Arthur Ashe (1943-1993).Arsenault (Southern History/Univ. of South Florida, St. Petersburg; The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert that Awakened America, 2009, etc.) uses his vast knowledge of civil rights history to properly situate the pioneering black tennis star within American and world history. Just short of 50, Ashe died from complications related to AIDS, "a disease he acquired from a blood transfusion administered during recovery from heart surgery in 1983." During his relatively short life, Ashe not only integrated big-time men's tennis; he also served as a scholar of black history, a civil rights activist, an ethicist, and a diplomat without a portfolio. In the early stages of the massively detailed chronology, the author's subject can seemingly do no wrong, but as the narrative progresses, Ashe begins to demonstrate his flaws, making decisions that prove unpopular or even counterproductive. One of the thorniest issues involved whether tennis professionalsespecially those considered nonwhiteshould boycott matches in apartheid-ridden South Africa. Ashe believed that an eternal boycott bordered on a simplistic nonsolution to racism, so he repeatedly sought a visa from the apartheid government. Arsenault chronicles Ashe's childhood rise from the segregated tennis courts of Richmond, Virginia, to less-discriminatory amateur play in other locales. Despite Ashe's extremely slight build as a child, he regularly defeated older, stronger players. The author cracks the puzzle of why Ashe became obsessive about starring in a sport usually limited to white country-club players. In fact, rarely has a biographer unearthed so much detail about a subject's life during childhood and adolescence. One of the most fascinating pieces of the Ashe saga becomes clear as Arsenault narrates the story of how journalist John McPhee focused on the battle between Ashe and a white tennis star for a book that became the classic Levels of the Game (1968).Readers uninterested in tennis will find the detailed match coverage tedious, but Arsenault skillfully guides readers to match point in a book that will be a go-to resource. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Arthur Ashe (1943-93) was a highly successful tennis player who won three of the sports' four major titles. His winning percentage, however, does not accurately reflect the importance of his life as an athlete, scholar, philanthropist, and political activist. Arsenault (John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History, Univ. of South Florida, St. Petersburg) does a masterful job of utilizing dozens of interviews with Ashe's family, friends and colleagues to shed light on the athlete's life. Born in Richmond, VA, under the grip of Jim Crow, Ashe took up the unlikely sport of tennis, practicing whenever he could. Eventually, Ashe earned a scholarship at the University of Southern California; his love of tennis equaled only by his passion for learning. As a professional player, he helped organize the Association of Tennis Professionals. His final years were dedicated to social justice, including the antiapartheid movement in South Africa and AIDS awareness in the United States. VERDICT Arsenault's effort to document Ashe's full life in one volume is commendable and will serve as the standard work on Ashe for some time.-Brian Renvall, Mesalands -Community Coll., Tucumcari, NM © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. ix |
| Prologue | p. 1 |
| 1 Under the Dominion | p. 5 |
| 2 Playing in the Shadows | p. 19 |
| 3 Dr. J and the Lynchburg Boys | p. 34 |
| 4 The Only Raisin in a Rice Pudding | p. 51 |
| 5 The Gateway | p. 66 |
| 6 The Golden Land | p. 83 |
| 7 Traveling Man | p. 111 |
| 8 From Dixie to Down Under | p. 139 |
| 9 Advantage Ashe | p. 160 |
| 10 Openings | p. 194 |
| 11 Mr. Cool | p. 228 |
| 12 Racket Man | p. 257 |
| 13 Doubling Down | p. 278 |
| 14 Risky Business | p. 295 |
| 15 South Africa | p. 320 |
| 16 Pros and Cons | p. 347 |
| 17 Wimbledon 1975 | p. 371 |
| 18 King Arthur | p. 387 |
| 19 Affairs of the Heart | p. 411 |
| 20 Coming Back | p. 433 |
| 21 Off the Court | p. 446 |
| 22 Captain Ashe | p. 467 |
| 23 Blood Lines | p. 493 |
| 24 Hard Road to Glory | p. 515 |
| 25 Days of Grace | p. 542 |
| 26 Final Set | p. 574 |
| Epilogue: Shadow's End | p. 606 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 631 |
| Arthur Ashe's Tennis Statistics | p. 641 |
| Note on Archival Sources and Interviews | p. 647 |
| Notes | p. 653 |
| Photo Credits | p. 725 |
| Index | p. 727 |
