EUGENE BULLARD

The remarkable exploits of the first African-American fighter pilot get lost in a rehash of Jazz Age name-dropping masquerading as biography.

Lloyd (History/Columbus State Univ.) wishes to celebrate Bullard as a war hero and adventurer, which from all evidence he was. But no clear narrative picture emerges of Bullard the man, who is obscured by the dazzling array of other black and white expatriates in 1920s Paris. Bullard was only six when a lynch mob forced his family to flee their home in Columbus, Georgia. He roamed several Southern states before stowing away on a ship to Germany, hoping somehow to reach the France of his boyhood dreams. He marked time in Britain as a vaudevillian and boxer, finally enlisting at age 19 in the French Foreign Legion at the start of WWI. Awarded the Croix de Guerre for his heroism in combat, Bullard went on to become a fighter pilot and, after the war, a jazz drummer and later a nightclub owner. His eventful, glamorous life certainly contains ample material for a colorful biography. But none of it comes through with any clarity or cogency in this effort. Although he had access to archival material, to Bullard's own memoir (All Blood Runs Red), and to at least one other biography (The Black Swallow of Death), Lloyd paints a tentative and incomplete portrait. Bullard is just another face lost in the Jazz Age Parisian crowd. There are Bricktop, Cole Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charlie Chaplin, Sidney Bechet, Sophie Tucker, Pablo Picasso, Nancy Cunard, the Prince of Wales; and then there is Bullard off in a corner, something of an afterthought in his own biography.

Reads as though the author had some other book in mind.