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Summary
Summary
A heartfelt, and riveting biography of the short life of a talented young African-American man who escapes the slums of Newark for Yale University only to succumb to the dangers of the streets--and of one's own nature--when he returns home.
When author Jeff Hobbs arrived at Yale University, he became fast friends with the man who would be his college roommate for four years, Robert Peace. Robert's life was rough from the beginning in the crime-ridden streets of Newark in the 1980s, with his father in jail and his mother earning less than $15,000 a year. But Robert was a brilliant student, and it was supposed to get easier when he was accepted to Yale, where he studied molecular biochemistry and biophysics. But it didn't get easier. Robert carried with him the difficult dual nature of his existence, "fronting" in Yale, and at home.
Through an honest rendering of Robert's relationships--with his struggling mother, with his incarcerated father, with his teachers and friends and fellow drug dealers-- The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace encompasses the most enduring conflicts in America: race, class, drugs, community, imprisonment, education, family, friendship, and love. It's about the collision of two fiercely insular worlds--the ivy-covered campus of Yale University and Newark, New Jersey, and the difficulty of going from one to the other and then back again. It's about poverty, the challenges of single motherhood, and the struggle to find male role models in a community where a man is more likely to go to prison than to college. It's about reaching one's greatest potential and taking responsibility for your family no matter the cost. It's about trying to live a decent life in America. But most all the story is about the tragic life of one singular brilliant young man. His end, a violent one, is heartbreaking and powerful and unforgettable.
Author Notes
Jeff Hobbs is the author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace , which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was made into the 2024 film Rob Peace. He is also the author of Show Them You're Good and The Tourists . He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A man with seemingly every opportunity loses his way in this compelling biographical saga. Novelist Hobbs (The Tourists) chronicles the life of Peace, who was born in a Newark, N.J., ghetto to an impoverished single mom and a father who went to prison for murder. Thanks to his mother's sacrifices and his extraordinary intellect he went to Yale and got a biology degree but when he returned to Newark after college, he became a drug dealer and was eventually shot to death by rivals. Writing with novelistic detail and deep insight, Hobbs, who was Peace's roommate at Yale, registers the disadvantages his friend faced while avoiding hackneyed fatalism and sociology. Hobbs reveals a man whose singular experience and charisma made him simultaneously an outsider and a leader in both New Haven and Newark, Peace was a pillar of his family and community, superbly capable in both settings, but he could not reconcile their conflicting demands. (The author's indelible portrait of Peace's inner-city neighborhood shows how it could draw him back from the world his talent and education had opened.) This is a classic tragedy of a man who, with the best intentions, chooses an ineluctable path to disaster. Photos. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Ambitious, moving tale of an inner-city Newark kid who made it to Yale yet succumbed to old demons and economic realities. Novelist Hobbs (The Tourists, 2007) combines memoir, sociological analysis and urban narrative elements, producing a perceptive page-turner regarding the life of his eponymous protagonist, also his college roommate. Peace's mother was fiercely independent, working nonstop in hospital kitchens to help aging parents keep their house. His father, a charming hustler, was attentive to Robert until his conviction on questionable evidence in a double murder. Mrs. Peace pushed her bright son toward parochial school, the best course for survival in Newark, already notorious for economic struggles and crime. Compulsively studious, Robert thrived therea banker alumnus offered to pay his college tuitionand also at Yale. Hobbs contrasts his personal relationship with Robert with a cutting critique of university life, for the privileged and less so, capturing the absurd remove that "model minority" and working-class students experience. At Yale, Peace both performed high-end lab work in his medical major and discreetly dealt marijuana, enhancing his campus popularity, even as he held himself apart: "Rob was incredibly skilled in not showing how he felt [and] at concealing who he was and who he wanted to be." After graduation, Peace drifted, as did many of his peers: Hobbs notes that even for their privileged classmates, professional success seemingly necessitated brutal hours and deep debt. But Peace drifted back into the Newark drug trade; in 2011, he was murdered by some of the city's increasingly merciless gangsters due to his involvement in high-grade cannabis production. Hobbs manages the ambiguities of what could be a grim tale by meticulously constructing environmental verisimilitude and unpacking the rituals of hardscrabble parochial schools, Yale secret societies, urban political machinations and Newark drug gangs. An urgent report on the state of American aspirations and a haunting dispatch from forsaken streets. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Rob Peace's father was a very bright drug dealer who served time for murder, leaving Rob in the care of a hardworking mother who wanted more for him than the tough streets of Orange, New Jersey, could provide. Peace started private school in fourth grade, just as his father's trial was beginning, and developed elaborate emotional and psychological strategies to navigate the neighborhood and Newark-proof himself. In high school, he undertook ponderous research to prove his father's innocence and eventually won a temporary reprieve on a technicality. His brilliance attracted the attention of a benefactor who made it possible for Peace to go to Yale, where he met and roomed with Hobbs. Peace majored in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, worked in the dining hall and biology lab, and sold drugs on the side. In a whirlwind of travel, philosophizing, and caretaking of others, Peace navigated the clashing cultures of urban poverty and Ivy League privilege, never quite finding a place where his particular brand of nerdiness and cool could coexist. His dreams and his reality collided when he was killed at 30 years of age in a drug dispute. Attending Peace's funeral, Hobbs was struck by the dichotomies of his old roommate's life and set out to offer a full picture of a very complicated individual. Writing with the intimacy of a close friend, Hobbs slowly reveals Peace as far more than a cliché of amazing potential squandered.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THERE ARE PLACES in America where life is so cheap and fate so brutal that, if they belonged to another country, America might bomb that country to "liberate" them. This book is a mesmeric account of such a place - a ghetto near Newark - that asks the consummate American question: Is it possible to reinvent yourself, to sculpture your own destiny? "The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace" seeks answers in the true story of two men, reared in the same mostly black, mostly luckless neighborhood, whose trajectories spectacularly diverge. One man is Shawn, born to a sweet-talking, drug-pushing father named Skeet, who tries to keep his son from books, fearing they will make him too soft for a hard world. Instead, Skeet teaches Shawn how to fight, intimidate, know everyone on avenues where it's lethal not to. When Skeet is imprisoned for killing two women, Shawn inherits his friends. He becomes a dealer, too, eventually sleeping in his car, wearing a Kevlar vest. The other man is Rob, son of a feistily aspirational mother, who, while toiling in kitchens, wishes for her child the escape she never had. She borrows books from the local library to read to her small son, and later buys him the first volume of an encyclopedia, getting additional ones, letter by letter, when she can afford them. She navigates their bleak world to find institutions and people who will help him. A Benedictine school rescues Rob. A bank executive offers to pay all his college expenses. Yale accepts him. He majors in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, and works in a cancer and infectious disease laboratory. What makes this book so devastating is that these two men, Rob and Shawn, are really one: Robert DeShaun Peace, who went from a New Jersey ghetto to Yale to wherever men go after dying face down, knees bent, in a drug-related murder. Nowadays there is reporting aplenty on the theme of two Americas. The originality of Jeff Hobbs's work lies in finding a man who lived simultaneously in both countries, who thrived and failed at the same time, who escaped his past and didn't, who was his father's son and his mother's son. Peace used and helped deal drugs while scoring a 1510 out of 1600 on his SATs, putting him in the 99th percentile nationally, and starring as a waterpolo player at his prep school; he got into Yale and immediately feared getting "curbed," having his face pressed into the street and a foot stomp on the back of his head until his teeth shattered; he worked in a cancer research lab while using that lab to launder drug revenue. That one man can contain such contradictions makes for an astonishing, tragic story. In Hobbs's hands, though, it becomes something more: an interrogation of our national creed of self-invention. It reminds us that there are origins in this country of ours that cannot be escaped, traumas that have no balm, holes that Medicaid and charter schools and better mental health care and prison reform can never fill. In the summer of 1998, Hobbs was just another wealthy white kid bound for Yale, in the tradition of his brother and sister. He received a roommate assignment: Robert Peace. The first thing Hobbs surmised about Peace, in their maladroit male attempt at a décor-coordinating phone call, was that he was black. But because Peace played water polo and seemed to live near Manhattan, Hobbs assumed skin color was probably all that separated them. Thus began an enduring odd-couple relationship. Hobbs and Peace were from different worlds, but at Yale they roomed together, commiserated over women, smoked weed (which Peace supplied as a leading campus dealer). They knew a bit about each other's pasts, but not much. They kept in touch sporadically after college, and Peace was a groomsman at Hobbs's wedding in Brooklyn. And then on May 18, 2011, 13 years after their first encounter, Hobbs learned over Facebook that his friend had passed away - had, in fact, been murdered in the game he had never stopped playing but had so masterfully hidden from so many. The death prompted Hobbs, until then a fiction writer (whose first book was also about Yale students), to swerve into nonfiction and investigate the man he and so many others thought they knew. Hobbs methodically reconstructs each of the worlds that made his friend: Peace's boyhood house on Chapman Street, with its "weedy rectangle of lawn" and "five buckled stoop stairs"; the fiercely loving St. Benedict's Preparatory School, where the boys sang school songs in the corridors; his neighborhood posse, whose dreams of college, wealth and stability slowly evaporate; the dealing underworld, which for Peace and many of his peers is the easiest, truest meritocracy they can see; Yale, with its suffocating levels of entitlement and the angst of many of its minority students. As a page turner alone, the story wins. It doesn't need further selling, and I won't spoil it. What is worth adding is that the book will be highly provocative, even irritating, to those who answer the problems of the American underclass with prefab ideological theories and solutions. It will force liberals to reconsider their aversion to talking about culture, habits, values and family breakdown as contributors to poverty. Poverty may be "structural," as liberals like to say, but the structures worked for Peace, and still there was a brokenness to his spirit, "crippling emotional trauma" from the absence of his imprisoned father, and a rage of generations - a rage that cannot be explained by the physics of one life alone. Hobbs is particularly convincing on the idea that no level of achievement or external intervention can compensate for the lack of family. As Hobbs writes from the point of view of Ina, one of Rob's girlfriends, whom he tried in vain to make a gun smuggler: "Problems such as theirs, problems that traced back generations and involved far more than money (though money was often their emblem), would never be solved with $500 every two weeks." Conservatives will love that a religious school and a rich banker were Peace's principal rescuers, but Hobbs's reporting shows us that Peace was the beneficiary of happy accidents, and that free markets and charity will never, on their own, solve a problem this dense, complex and knotted. Hobbs is a solid writer with considerable empathy and gifts for narrative and suspense. What mars this book is only the often bland prose. Where there is a cliché at Hobbs's disposal, an interesting word simply won't do. Mothers "gossip." Children "play." Someone has a "wrong place-wrong time misunderstanding." Someone else has to "get on with her life." Rob's friend's approach to life: "laid-back." A friar's sermon is full of - you guessed it - "fire and brimstone." Peace feels "nostalgia for the past and excitement about the future." At times, Hobbs lapses into what can only be called a dudebro patois: "Rob and I made a food run." Too, Hobbs loves starting sentences with "too." NARRATIVE NONFICTION is already hard pressed to compete with concocted tales, and such poverty of expression forces it to dazzle us with the reporting alone. Fiction has such inbuilt advantages in its power to imagine inner life and present narratives free of the factual gaps inevitable in true stories. Narrative nonfiction must strive for the literary if it's to have a chance at the audience garnered by important fiction. And "The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace" deserves that chance. It deserves a turn in the nation's pulpit from which it can beg us to see the third world America in our midst. Robert Peace, who called his mother "my heart," was her only and beloved son. But he was our son, too. We are the wondrous country that made him a Yale man. We are the wanting country where even that wasn't enough to spare him. Robert DeShaun Peace went from a New Jersey ghetto to Yale to a drug-related murder. ANAND GIRIDHARADAS writes the "Letter From America" column for The International New York Times and is the author of "The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas."
Library Journal Review
The story of Newark-native Robert Peace's journey from poverty to Yale University and ultimately a violent death, as related by his college roommate. (LJ 9/1/14) (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.