Bill’s Pick
November 2014
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League
Jeff Hobbs, Published September 2014
This biography examines the life of a man of color, Robert Peace, who was born and raised in Orange, New Jersey. Peace’s life story is recounted by his college roommate, who interviewed many of Rob’s friends, family, teachers, and associates and carried out comprehensive research.
At its most basic level and as succinctly set out in the book jacket overleaf, Peace’s story is that of a man who “was born outside Newark in a ghetto known as ‘Illtown.’ His unwed mother worked long hours in a kitchen. His charismatic father was later convicted of a double murder. Peace’s intellectual brilliance and hard-won determination earned him a full scholarship to Yale University. At college, while majoring in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, he straddled the world of academia and the world of the street, never revealing his full self in either place. Upon graduation from Yale, he went home to teach at the Catholic high school [St. Benedict’s Preparatory School, Newark, NJ] he’d attended, slid [more deeply] into the drug trade, and was brutally murdered at age thirty.” Hobbs tells “the whole story” of the man.
Hobbs’s writing is clear and effective; it reveals compassion, but it is also expressive of the frustration that the author and many of Peace’s associates felt and continue to feel about the choices that Rob made. At its heart, Hobbs’s account tells of a brilliant, complicated young man, who lived in two worlds – the one he was born to and which he thought of as “real” and the one he aspired to and where his intellect took him. Those whom Peace loved and cared most about wanted him to choose the latter, the tragedy of his life was that he could not.