Days of Grace

May 31, 1993
In this inspirational, eloquent autobiographical memoir, tennis great Ashe, who died earlier this year, describes his battle against AIDS, which he contracted from a blood transfusion during open-heart surgery, and tells of his struggle against racism. Written with Rampersad, biographer of Langston Hughes, the first-person narrative negates the conventional image of Ashe as cold and aloof, giving us instead a complex, vulnerable, emotional man. The death of his mother when he was six left ``an emptiness in my soul.'' Ashe writes of his dependence on his wife Jeanne and recalls growing up under segregation in Virginia, which motivated his activist opposition to South Africa's apartheid. Politically outspoken, Ashe defends the distribution of condoms in schools, attacks demagogues like Al Sharpton and criticizes ``the decline of the African American community'' and its ``new order . . . based squarely on revenge, not justice, with morality discarded.'' The volume closes with a deeply moving letter to his six-year-old daughter Camera. Photos. 150,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB alternates.