Rating: 
Summary: This was a BORING book!!
Review: This book was on my high school summer reading list and I think that this was not an appropriate book for a freshman reading list. I thought that I would try to be optimistic about the books but I found it very very boring, although I like one chapter in the book. The problem with that chapter was it basically summarized the whole book, and I still had about 10 chapters to go!!
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.
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