{"id":4731,"date":"2015-08-14T06:57:32","date_gmt":"2015-08-14T10:57:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4731"},"modified":"2015-08-14T06:57:32","modified_gmt":"2015-08-14T10:57:32","slug":"the-short-and-tragic-life-of-robert-peace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4731","title":{"rendered":"****The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"graduate\"

Rob Peace, Yale Graduation<\/p><\/div>\n

By Jeff Hobbs, read by George Newbern<\/a>\"\"
\n\u2013 This biography, which signals its key irony by the subtitle A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League<\/em>, is an honest and heartfelt tribute to a dear friend. Rob\u2019s many gifts\u2014a brilliant mind, athletic talent, easy social skills, and powerful loyalty to his parents, family, and friends\u2014cry out for a different life path, while the forecast conclusion hangs over the book like a shroud. Nearing the end, the reader wants to go more and more slowly to delay it. Forecast, but foreordained? Hobbs wrestles with this question throughout.<\/p>\n

Rob graduated from Yale with a degree in the intellectually rigorous fields of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, and Jeff Hobbs was his roommate there for four years. But in addition to studying and working in a cancer research lab, Rob dealt marijuana. He did it mainly, it seems, to relieve his single mother\u2014a nursing home food service employee\u2014of some of her financial burdens. After graduation, he taught for a while, then lapsed into work as a baggage handler at Newark Airport because that job allowed him to fly free all over the world. He fell in love with Rio, visited Seoul, and kept up with a water polo teammate in Croatia. Now in his mid-20s, he continued to deal marijuana, even though the gang-infused streets of East Orange and Newark had become many times more dangerous than in the past.<\/p>\n

Although Hobbs recorded the thoughts of so many friends and acquaintances Peace had during his post-college years, he cannot definitively answer the urgent question that so many of them asked Rob repeatedly and urgently, \u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d A question that is as much unanswered as, perhaps, unanswerable. They saw the growing danger and weren\u2019t satisfied with his typical answer: \u201cIt\u2019s all good.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it was not. When Rob was a boy his father went to prison for a pair of murders he most likely didn\u2019t commit, and Rob took on the job of looking after his hard-working mother. She sacrificed mightily to keep him into private school, to see her dreams flower with his Yale education then burst when he just somehow couldn\u2019t grab onto a life that would keep him moving forward.<\/p>\n

Rob was the son of two entirely separate worlds\u2014a New Jersey ghetto and a privileged Ivy League university. \u201cThat one man can contain such contradictions makes for an astonishing, tragic story,\u201d said New York Times<\/em> reviewer Anand Giridharadas<\/a>, \u201cbut it becomes something more: an interrogation of our national creed of self-invention.\u201d Try as we might, \u201cthere are origins in this country of ours that cannot be escaped,\u201d he says, believing the most significant of which may be lack of an intact family.<\/p>\n

Hobbs\u2019s prose is unadorned. He\u2019s writing about a friend, after all, and actor Newbern\u2019s narration fits the text well. The clich\u00e9s Giridharadas objected to in his review are probably not as glaring in the audio version as they would be on the page and, while the writing isn\u2019t lyrical, it gets the job done, building an indelible portrait of so much good forever lost.
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