Days of Grace: A Memoir

Rating:
Summary: AN ENDURING LEGACY OF GREATNESS
Review:

That tennis great Arthur Ashe died a victim of AIDS on February 6, 1993, is an undeniable tragedy. The fact that while he lived, he did so with consummate integrity, intelligence, and grace, remains his enduring legacy. Written with literary biographer Arnold Rampersad, Ashe's DAYS OF GRACE provides readers with a powerful portrait of an exceptional individual entrenched in the issues and passions of his life and times, a man who was one of the most dynamic athletes and humanitarians of his or any other generation. In this invitingly intimate and yet stoically objective memoir, Ashe grapples with the issues of sports, racism, and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) which he contracted while receiving a blood transfusion after his second heart bypass operation in 1983. DAYS OF GRACE reveals different sides to a man many described as "cold" while he lived. The view from within does not support this description. Some very warm snapshots are provided of Ashe as a man who never stopped being an obedient son, as a fervent patriot, lover of art, serious intellectual, mystical seeker, generous philanthropist, devoted husband, and loving father. His tendency to gloss over such feats as writing a landmark three-volume history of black athletes, his historic victory at Wimbledon, or his association with people like Nelson Mandela and Jesse Jackson, rings true to an exceptional character whose many parts add up to a truly noble and memorable sum.
Aberjhani
author of THE WISDOM OF W. E. B. DU BOIS
and ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE



Rating:
Summary: A Great Man's Inspirational Memoir
Review: A personal account of a man who seemed to have lived every day of his life as if it were his finest hour. I can't imagine a better demonstration of dignity, courage, honor, and circumspection than the example set by Mr. Ashe, and he tells his story well, but modestly. From the personal to the political, Mr. Ashe shows by example what it is to live fully and responsibly as a world citizen and how to face unrelenting challenges with intelligence and grace. This book is one that will be a the top of my children's reading list.

Rating:
Summary: Like gold tested by fire
Review: Although I never met Arthur Ashe in person, what a great resource he leaves us with this autobiography. Arthur was a man of faith, morals, business, intellect and manners. Oh yeah, he was also one heckuva tennis player. My personal enduring memory of Arthur came not in the form of his Wimbledon upset of Jimmy Connors, but rather by a subsequent televised loss some years later to John McEnroe. It would be a complete understatement to say that McEnroe carried on like <l'enfant terrible>. Arthur suffered through Mac's innumerable hissy fits in that match with the perturbed patience of a monastic saint enduring the constant wails of an infidel. It is hard to adequately describe Ashe's remarkable countenance that night, except to say it was the most powerful display of silence I have ever witnessed in sport. So, it came as quite a surprise to learn in this book how much admiration and respect Arthur had for John, and how much John devoted to the Davis Cup matches. If your athletic son or daughter hopes to avoid learning too late in life that there is a lot more to it than sports and glory, I implore you to force them to read Days of Grace.

Rating:
Summary: this book is great
Review: The book "Days of Grace: A Memoir
by Arthur Ashe, Arnold Rampersad" is a great book. I thought both Arthur Ashe and Arnold Rampersad did a great job with writing the book. The book mainly talks about Arthur Ashe's struggle with aids. The book also talks about how his life and tennis career was affected by aids and how he dealt with it.

The book talks about Arthur Ashe's struggle to cope with aids. Arthur Ashe's struggle with aids was an eye opener. The book also talked about Arthur Ashe donating to charities and foundations dedicated to contributing aid to aids patients.

Arthur Ashe's tennis career was heavily effected by aids. Although he received the disease accidentally by blood transfusion, Arthur Ashe talks about the importance of protection during sex or abstinence.

Overall I thought the book was a good book to read. Sometimes the chapters tend to drag which causes the book to be boring at times, but overall it is a very good book to read, and I recommend people to read it. I gave the book 4 out of 5 stars.

Rating:
Summary: Profound
Review: The book was a wonderful read it was deep thought provoking happy and ultimately sad. The title could also have been called A Journey In Courage.I did not know much about Arthur Ashe at the time of his death I like many of my comtemporaries heaped unneccesary praise on the Micheal Jordan's and Jerry Rice's of the world when Arthur Ashe's poster should have been on my wall. Unlike them and (countless others) he was so much more than just an athelete. Just like his book is so much more than just a read it is as though your having a conversation over coffee and your running late for work but you do not care because you are talkin to Arthur, his book has everything in it from sound financial advice to help in choosing the right mate. We lost a true treasure with his passing.

Rating:
Summary: Very Inspiring
Review: The title perfectly describes this book. We learn of his life and how he conducted himself as a person -- being a gentleman and a citizen of the world. The book starts out pretty much at the time when the news of Arthur Ashe having contracted AIDS (through a contaminated blood transfusion) broke out. Also, the chapters of him being the Davis Cup captain and having to work with Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe as players on the team are a great read. This is a very touching and inspiring book.

Rating:
Summary: Very Inspiring
Review: The title perfectly describes this book. We learn of his life and how he conducted himself as a person -- being a gentleman and a citizen of the world. The book starts out pretty much at the time when the news of Arthur Ashe having contracted AIDS (through a contaminated blood transfusion) broke out. Also, the chapters of him being the Davis Cup captain and having to work with Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe as players on the team are a great read. This is a very touching and inspiring book.

Rating:
Summary: Health, race, sex, politics, religion, family...
Review: This is a sad yet uplifting memoir from a great man who was taken from us much too soon. Arthur speaks with dignity and intelligence on all the aforementioned topics and more. This is that rare book that makes you feel a better person for having read it.
So why withhold one star? Selfishly, I was a bit disappointed that Arthur didn't tell us more about his own magnificent tennis playing. His win over Connors at Wimbledon in '75, for example, was as shocking and historic an upset as you'll see in sports, but Arthur mentions it only in passing, in connection with other events, with no details or insight into how the match unfolded.
I suppose he knew time was short and he had many more important things to say.
I'm glad he did, and I'm sorry he's gone.

Rating:
Summary: a tad too voyeuristic
Review: We live in a day and age when the President of the United States tells us what kind of underwear he sports and, through a string of unfortunate circumstances, we find out about even his genital abnormalities. He famously attests to feeling our pain, tears up at the drop of a hat and bites his own lip almost as often as those of the women he accosts. No emotion, real or faked, is allowed to go unmentioned. No facet of his life is too private to remain hidden. He seems to be incapable of embarassment, devoid of shame, almost proud of personal scandal. Everything--good, bad & indifferent--is on display and no thought is given to how the public and his peers perceive him. His life is about personal gratification and little else.

How different this is from the example of George Washington. As Gordon Wood has written in an excellent essay in the Virginia Historical Review, to Washington reputation was of paramount importance. Nothing mattered more to him than how he was perceived by his fellow men. This obsession fostered in him a moral rectitude that has served to make him seem somehow less than human, as if he had become a statue before he was even dead. But it also made him a world historical figure, a man of unquestioned greatness. And if our modern sensibilities find something vainglorious in his vanity and we feel a certain lack of connection with him because of his seeming perfection, at least he has maintained an aura of mystery and a sterling reputation for two centuries and counting.

What's the point of all this? Just that Arthur Ashe seems to me to have been the George Washington of modern sport, an accomplishment that was all the more notable at a time when his fellow atheletes were increasingly emulating Bill Clinton. The title of this memoir is especially appropriate because throughout his entire career Ashe seemed to be imbued with a quality of personal grace. He was always a class act, always reserved, always professional, politically active without being shrill--he simply seemed to be better balanced and more grounded than most of those he competed against. In fact, the rap on him was that he was too self-contained and that he needed to be more outer directed in order to win tennis matches (see Orrin's review of John McPhee's Levels of the Game). Whether being more emotionally labile is truly of benefit on the court seems open to debate, but at any rate, Ashe remained a somewhat enigmatic, enormously respected figure.

It therefore came as a genuine shock when he announced to the world that he had contracted AIDs. Suddenly this most private of public men was inextricablty tied to a disease whose associations were overwhelming behavioral. What had happened to bring Ashe into the glare of the sensational public spotlight and, in particular, how was it possible that he, of all people, came to be identified with a disease that carried with it such negative moral connotations? This is the point where Ashe begins his moving memoir.

In answering these questions, he is forced to reveal himself in ways that he never had during his career. The effect is by turns affecting and disquieting. I understand why he felt the need to share so much with the public, if for no other reason than to protect his carefully carved reputation, but by the end of the book, when he closes with a long admonitory letter that he wrote to his daughter, I just felt that he had gone too far. Ultimately, he has nearly done a disservice to himself by exposing so much. His life story and his description of the way in which family, sport and God sustained and nourished him throughout that exemplary life is eminently worthwhile. But I finished the book feeling almost like a voyuer and wishing that he'd held back a little more. I preferred him when he was more Washington than Clinton.

GRADE: B

Rating:
Summary: The book is great
Review: `Days of Grace' is possibly the most moving biography, if not book, I have ever read, by a man whose courage, determination and decency towards fellow man have left me in awe.

The book contains moments of humour, of deep sadness and of joy, and throughout there is a vein of truthfulness that is unparalleled in anything I have ever read. The experiences that Ashe had in his life were so many and so varied, from the highs of winning three Grand Slam's to falling ill to heart disease and AIDS. His relationships with his parents, his wife and daughter, tennis players including Connors and McEnroe, and with his peers in segregated Virginia are all explored thoughtfully and with careful reflection.

In short, Ashe's book offers an account of his life, his beliefs and his final thoughts on the world and his life. Ashe triumphed in sport to become wealthy and well known, but suffered from racial prejudice as a child and terrible diseases as an adult. Yet not once did wealth change his outlook or basic lifestyle nor did he give up in the face of racism or death. Instead Ashe took another path, the noble path - he showed deep respect and understanding towards his fellow man, he used his wealth and his disease to help thousands of others and he never lost site of the moral lessons he had learned as child.

`Days of Grace' is a remarkable book from Arthur Ashe, an extraordinary man.