Esil's Reviews > The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

I'm trying to sort through my reaction to The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace. Jeff Hobbs writes about his former Yale roommate, Rob Peace, who was tragically killed at age of 30 likely as a result of his involvement in the drug trade. Robert was African American and grew up in a very low income crime ridden part of New Jersey. Hobbs recounts in meticulous detail Rob's life -- the neighbourhood he grew up in, his single mother's love and dedication, his bond with his father even after he was sent to jail on first degree murder charges, his multiple childhood friends, his education at Saint Benedict's high school, his admission and attendance at Yale, and the years after graduation when he worked at many jobs and was constantly angling to make money in part to feed his generosity to family and friends. Hobbs works hard to depict Rob's circumstances, what he did throughout his life and the minutia of many of his interactions with all the people with whom he came into contact. We know that he was incredibly smart, sailing easily through high school and Yale, was very dedicated to friends and family, loved traveling, had an element of aimlessness and despite his crazy intelligence was quite capable of making really stupid decisions. And all of this is fascinating and kept my interest as I faithfully listened to this book on audio. But in the end, I am left with the feeling that something is missing. I'm still not sure that I know Rob particularly well -- I am not sure that Hobbs -- who clearly had a lot of respect and love for his friend -- was ever able to access what made Rob tick. Perhaps Hobbs' own life experience and circumstances which are so different from Rob's mean that it was hard for him to access and really get at Rob's inner world. Or perhaps Rob was a guarded person that no one really got to know. But I'm left with a feeling of disconnect between the detailed account of Rob's like and the feeling that I never really got to know him. I do appreciate that Hobbs has not turned this book into a polemic about race and class. There's a lot of food for thought in Robert Peace's story about these issues -- but maybe in the end Hobbs' gift to Rob and his family and friends is that he's not merely portrayed as the sum total of his socioeconomic circumstances or as a statistic -- he was a complex guy -- so smart and "so fucking dumb" as one of his friends put it. The course of his life what not pre ordained by his initial circumstances -- his path to the end of his life is a complex mixture of circumstance, personality, family and choice.