I don't quite know what informal means, but his biography is certainly not intimate. Nor can it be, as Paul Robeson Jr. saw very little of his father during the period covered in this first volume, which ends when he was 12 years old. While his father and mother lived in London, Paul Jr. was raised by his grandmother and attended school in Switzerland, the United States and the Soviet Union. Thereafter, father and son lived in the same house for only brief periods until the family returned to the United States in 1939. But his father died 25 years ago, so unless Paul Jr. taped or made extensive notes of his conversations, he is asking us to rely on his memory of his father's memories.
Memory is a valuable source for the historian, but it is also dangerously unreliable.
The Undiscovered Paul Robeson'' reads like Paul Jr.'s attempt to correct the story of his father's life as told by Duberman. In the end, however, it adds little and omits a great deal from the earlier biography. Duberman's sources are richer, his prose more vital, his understanding of the historical context far greater, his interpretations subtler and sounder. The son's most striking achievement is the narrative he provides of his parents' tortured marriage. He reassures the reader that his parents loved each other, but he also recounts, in excruciating detail, his father's many affairs and his callous disregard of his wife.