This book was received as a free review copy for the Big book Awards


I tend to avoid biography as a genre, usually limiting my non-fiction reading to history or science, so wasn’t sure how much I’d like reviewing a biography, but when I opened the package and saw that it was about Paul Robeson I was intrigued.


Straight away, I was engaged. The single page prelude is a brief scene from the House Unamerican Activities Committee in 1956 before, in his introduction, Jeff Sparrow writes about a performance of Robeson’s for workers building the Sydney Opera House in 1960, and carefully sets the tone for what is to come, hinting at the hardships and activism of Robeson’s life, and their modern parallels. This is a biography of a man, but Sparrow also uses it a framework to view the times in which he lived and compare them to our own. To contrast the discrimination that Robeson experienced and the activism through which he fought it to a world today that is still built upon many of the same prejudices, for all it has changed.


For each stage of Robeson’s life - his childhood in Princeton, and the Harlem renaissance and early success, and then London and increased fame at home, his time in Moscow and his subsequent character assassination when the USSR became the enemy and Joseph McCarthy created the spectre of a red under every bed, his years in the wilderness and brief return before the decades of stress and disappointment took their toll - the author cleverly weaves the strands of pure biography with what might have been no more than background information and colour, but becomes a solid examination of the time and place itself, and a shadow thrown forward to the present day.


The portrayal of Robeson - referred to as Paul almost exclusively - verges on hero worship, but shows enough of his flaws to just stop short. And this is understandable; he was not only a man of prodigious talent and strength, but used those to fight throughout his life for the discriminated and disenfranchised - his own people as well as those he met elsewhere, such as the striking Welsh miners with whom he found such a bond.


Perhaps partly as this is as much a history book as a biography - and certainly because of the skill of the author - I enjoyed this far more than I expected. Both Robeson’s life and the ideals for which he fought will stay with me, so job done Mr Sparrow.
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Jeff Sparrow’s biography of Paul Robeson is great reading, even if you have never heard of Paul Robeson. The blurb actually says that Robeson is one of the 20th century’s most accomplished but forgotten figures – but surely not? Could this voice really be forgotten?

But Paul Robeson, superstar of the early 20th century that he was, was not just an extraordinary bass singer. His father the Reverend William Drew Robeson had been a slave and he was ambitious for his son. He saw to it that Paul transcended the institutional racism all around him under the Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation in America until 1965. Paul became the third ever African-American student at Rutgers University, and he graduated with both academic and sporting distinction. He then went on to enrol at Columbia university, supporting himself with football coaching and – with the encouragement of the girl he married, ‘Essie’ Goode – also with an emerging career as a performer.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/03/07/no-way-but-this-in-search-of-paul-robeson-by...