Rapid Ray is John Cooper’s second telling of Ray Lewis’s life story. The first, Shadow Running, was aimed at adults, but both books share the same strengths and weaknesses.

Hamilton-born Ray Lewis is the great- grandson of escaped slaves. He won a bronze track-and-field medal at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1932 and a silver one at the British Empire Games in 1934. A member of the Order of Canada, he was a railway porter for the Canadian Pacific Railway for 22 years. His achievements were gained despite the racial prejudice that pervaded Canadian society in those days, and Rapid Ray is as much the story of Lewis’s struggle to overcome those prejudices as it is of his achievements.

Opportunities for blacks in Lewis’s day were few but he never demeaned himself by playing the role that ignorant whites cast for him. For example, when a man once asked, “Do you like watermelon, boy?” Lewis responded coolly, “Yes, sir, we like it fried.”

Like Shadow Running, Rapid Ray is told in Lewis’s voice. The voice rings true when Lewis is recounting personal stories, some of them funny, such as when the Ontario premier lost his false teeth on a train. But the pages outlining the history of racism and slavery don’t sound like words Ray Lewis would use in telling a story.

The chronological structure of the book also lacks dramatic pacing so that minor personal events have the same weight as Lewis’s running triumphs and tragedies. A different dramatic structure might have increased the book’s appeal to its target audience, but Rapid Ray will still prove a useful text for kids in telling the life story of a remarkable man and providing an interesting introduction to Canadian racial perspectives in the 1930s.