Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson Book

Jack Johnson´s story is fascinating - he was hero and anti-hero in one lifetime. An example to his people and the world of how to live and of how not to live. He was a man who changed the world - or America at least - and who became one of the most hated public figures in the same nation.
Johnson always compared himself to Napoleon in the way he managed to drag himself up from relatively obscure beginnings to what he considered the top of the world - in this case, the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship. Johnson managed this as a black man in a society which was almost unbelievably racist: this book is a study in turn of the century racism more than anything else. It has to be read to be believed - what passes for hard right, neo-Nazi, white supremacist rhetoric nowadays was once the mainstream, published in newspapers which these days see themselves as bastions of liberalism and free speech. Vile, deeply racist abuse was the orthodoxy back then: the fight against Jim Jeffries for the belt was the white race against the black.
Johnson - in his youth and prime a wonderful fighter - always did what he wanted with his life. He feared no-one. He liked fast cars, women of all races, fighting and spoke and wrote well. But this cavalier, I-don´t-care-what-you-think-of-me attitude, didn´t sit well with whites and, later, blacks - especially when his life took nastier turns such as a spell in jail or when the suicide of his wife became news. Instead of behaving as he "should", Johnson behaved as he wanted.
As a history of what happened, this book is exemplary. It is made up of contemporary accounts from newspapers and eye witnesses and relies heavily on Johnson´s own biographies. As a biography and portrait of the man himself, the book fails. Johnson is there in fragments, comes in and out in lopsided episodes, speaks in a variety of voices and manners. He plays a part in his life but the story is told from the outside, not the inside, and it´s tedious where it should be interesting, for me.
As a study in racism and the reality of turn of the last century American society, the book is exemplary and well-researched - unflinching, too. As a study of Jack Johnson, the human being, the book is flimsy. So too as a boxing book: only occasionally does it light up and do you feel you are "really there".
A disappointment.