For those who have long admired Ashe, this close look at his life offers even more evidence that he was more than a great player, he was an extraordinary person ... Arthur Ashe: A Life is among the best books about tennis I’ve ever read — it’s a deep, detailed, thoughtful chronicle of one of the country’s best and most important players. I wanted to hear more, though, about Ashe’s game and what sort of player he was on the court. And the author (whose previous books include Freedom Riders) is on thin ice when he suggests that Ashe was more popular among whites than blacks. Among blacks who love tennis, Ashe remains a god to this day ... In many ways, Ashe, more than Ali, is the spiritual father of Colin Kaepernick, the seminal athlete-activist of today. Kaepernick’s protest — both his kneeling and his public persona over these last two years — has been calm and dignified in a way Ashe would have respected. Ashe is the kind of man we can hope our children grow up to be like — worldly, smart, cool, thoughtful, politically engaged — which is why my parents made sure I got to meet him all those years ago.
Raymond Arsenault has created a posthumous paean to Arthur Ashe ... Arsenault has worked through interviews with those who knew Ashe, and also with Ashe’s own extensive personal writings, so that the man’s voice is heard again. This thorough account naturally will be of particular interest to sports fans ... Arsenault's book has the power to invade the hearts of those who did not experience the American Civil Rights movement directly.
Weighing 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.
Arthur Ashe: A Life is plainly a labor of love by Raymond Arsenault, a history professor at the University of South Florida. He has set himself a worthy task: to tell Ashe’s story in the context of the push for civil rights in America and the arduous ascent of black tennis players to the pinnacle commanded today by Serena Williams. One problem is that the diffident Ashe—who died at 49 in 1993 of complications of AIDS contracted from a blood transfusion—was for many years more focused on fighting apartheid 8,000 miles away in South Africa than on the black struggle at home. The other is that the social and political history tends to diffuse the focus from Ashe’s own epochal career. The result is an encyclopedic recitation.
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) ... 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.
Twenty-five years after Ashe’s death, Raymond Arsenault, a professor of history at the University of South Florida, has written a thoroughly captivating biography ... Ashe was 49. He’d done so much in such a short time. As this book eloquently reveals, one can only wonder and shed at least one tear for what more he might have accomplished.
...less a biography of a tennis player than a biography of a man who happened to play tennis. Ashe himself would have had it no other way ... Ashe was always aware of his status as a trailblazer in the white world of tennis, an awareness that helped inform the dignity with which he famously carried himself as a player and as an outspoken black activist and public intellectual. Arsenault renders this aspect of the story exquisitely, moving smoothly between tennis and politics and Ashe’s ongoing efforts to determine and articulate his positions with respect to the important issues of his time ... if there’s one shortcoming to the book it’s a lack of feel for Ashe’s game. Arsenault spends little time on Ashe’s style of play or giving a sense of how Ashe got to be as good as he did ... Arsenault’s readers will find instead a rare perspective on a professional athlete in which the sport does not make the man.
In company with only a handful of other star athletes, he is more than deserving of a lengthy, comprehensive biography, this one written gracefully by historian Raymond Arsenault. The author’s meticulous treatment of his subject is bolstered by a vast trove of sources ... Arsenault’s 780-page book can get bogged down in inside-tennis arcana (such as obscure disputes among the organizations that governed the sport); nevertheless, this biography is a laudable achievement. Arsenault moves seamlessly between sports and social history, marking time with tennis competitions and civil-rights milestones.
Area tennis enthusiasts who pick up a copy of Arthur Ashe: A Life will be pleased to find that author Raymond Arsenault devotes an entire chapter to the nine months when the late tennis star lived in St. Louis ... While Arsenault credits the St. Louisans...who helped Ashe develop his tennis game, he paints a dreary picture of Ashe’s experience here overall.
...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 ... 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. Readers uninterested in tennis will find the detailed match coverage tedious, but Arsenault guides readers to match point in a book that will be a go-to resource.
The first black superstar in men’s tennis makes a significant mark off the court in this inspiring but staid biography. Historian Arsenault 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 ... Readers will find his saga admirable, but not very taut.
