Week two: Brother Ray

This week I read The Last Days of Brother Ray by David Ritz as part of our assigned reading. The text was a very interesting first hand account of what was going on in Ray Charles head through the later years of his career leading up to his death. The text was as close to autobiographical as a man like Ray Charles would have allowed. Ray was not a man to spill his emotions. He had no secrets but at the same time had a hard shell built up over the long struggle that was his life. The text is written from the perspective of the author, a close friend of Ray's made over the course of writing Ray's first biography (if I remember correctly). Ritz did an amazing job of letting the reader see a side of Ray even his close friends never saw. Ray lived a life on invulnerability. He had money, women, possessions, friends and all the talent anyone could ask for. Even though he had lost his sight along with his mother as a child, he never let life push him around.