PositiveThe Washington PostWeighing in at 629 pages of text, Arthur Ashe: A Life is the kind of very-full-length biography that can break your nose if you doze off while reading it in bed. Unfortunately, you might. This is a book where more turns out to be less. Arsenault, a well-respected historian of the civil rights movement, exhaustively reconstructs Ashe’s life and does an impressively thorough job embedding Ashe’s activism in the larger context of his times. He is just as meticulous about Ashe’s tennis, dutifully recounting the results of just about every match he ever played ... Arsenault provides an authoritative view of his subject’s evolving thoughts about race, compromise and resistance, but with a few exceptions, he doesn’t really explore Ashe’s thoughts between the lines ... Arsenault has essentially written two books: an unenlightening rehash of a very good tennis career, and an insightful narrative of the evolution of a remarkable human being ... Arsenault often treats the two sides of Ashe’s life as if he were writing about two separate people ... The good news is, Ashe was a very interesting man, and Arsenault has sympathetically but comprehensively provided the receipts.
