This may be the saddest book I've ever read. Robert Peace grew up in a hard but not desperate neighborhood in Newark. He was blessed with a mother of extreme dedication and strength who scraped to put Robert through solid Catholic schools. This, combined with Robert's evident powerful intellect and capacity to work fiendishly hard saw him through a Yale bachelor's degree, funded by a wealthy donor to his high school. He graduated with a degree in hard science, debt-free. So far so good. But Robert, who was also good-looking, athletic, compassionate and a born leader, carried substantial psychic debt. Hobbs was his roommate at Yale for four years and traces Rob's life from birth until his heartbreaking death, nine years after college graduation. Hobbs is incredibly sensitive, mostly avoiding the temptation to make Robert a symbol of wider social ills. He paints an individual human being so clearly that the reader feels his death as a personal loss.
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