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Title: A Personal Odyssey: Library Edition by Thomas Sowell, Jeff Riggenbach ISBN: 0-7861-2144-0 Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks Pub. Date: February, 2002 Format: Audio Cassette Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $56.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.2 (20 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A useful guide in your own life
Comment: I think Thomas Sowell writes the best column in America. No one takes the conventional progressive orthodoxy and exposes it better than he does. Take these quotes for instance:
We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.
The people I feel sorry for are those who insist on continuing to do what they have always done but want the results to be different from what they have always been.
There may be a lot of people who feel like he does, but few can express it so well. I was happy to finally get to read his memoir and it's much different than the witticisms in his column. The book is a very earnest account of the challenges of growing up and not knowing how to use one?s abilities. Sowell was brilliant even as a kid, but his family wasn?t supportive and he was too rebellious to get along well in school. After a working a while, and a stint in the Marines, Sowell was able to find his center and educate himself. He does this without the benefit of his family or Affirmative Action, which he opposes.
I think he's as interesting writer because he's always in conflict with authority. This happened in public school, the Marines, in college, the Labor Department, and when he taught at Cornell University. It still continues. Sowell just refuses to live to the polite standards of modern enlightenment when they are illogical.
It would have been easy for a man of Sowell?s intellect to play the game and become a black leader as powerful as Jesse Jackson is. Not being conventional has cost him many opportunities in his life, but it has gained him his self-respect, individualism and new opportunities.
The moral of the story is that you can choose to trade your soul for riches or you can enrich your soul with your own integrity. The former results in therapy the later brings peace of mind.
Rating: 4
Summary: Anecdotes Of a Scholar
Comment: "A Personal Odyssey" is a collection of anecdotal remembrances of Thomas Sowell from his birth to the date of the writing. Written in an almost stream of consciousness style, it conveys his thoughts and values without preaching them.
Born to a poor family in the south, Sowell was given to relatives who became his new family. With this new family he moved to New York were he attended school and eventually left an intolerable home life to set out on his own at a young age.
Through this book we learn of his family, schools, his jobs, both in and out of the academy, his brushes with the political world and his interaction with the black and white communities.
There is something for many readers in this book. Everyone who has felt betrayed by family will sympathize with Sowell's young life. Everyone who has struggled with a difficult child will feel his pain when telling of his son's delayed speech. His succession of job experiences will be eye-opening for those who never worked in the academy. I think that readers generally will appreciate being spared the details of the breakdown of his marriage.
The concept of Thomas Sowell as a black man in a white world runs throughout "A Personal Odyssey." Recognizing the discrimination prevalent in society, Sowell advocates realistic and helpful solutions, while expressing his disgust with what "Black Leaders" have done to their community. Throughout his career, Sowell has striven to be accepted as a man and an economist, not as a token or a black guru. As one who came in through the front door, he resents the implication that all successful blacks come in through the back door (affirmative action).
Sowell devotes much ink to dispelling notions that he played significant roles in the Ford and Reagan Administrations. Although he is perceived as a Conservative Republican, he makes it clear that he is largely apolitical. I find Sowell's position as one who neither votes nor belongs to any political party as troublesome. Although his disgust with his treatment by political operatives is understandable, his decision to drop out of the political process is hard to understand.
Thomas Sowell leaves each reader to formulate his own opinions of the author. Personally, I gained added respect for Sowell as one who has courageously surmounted daunting obstacles and has fought for what he believed to be right. At the same time, I have to suspect that he is a difficult person to get along with. He seems to have had a lot of family problems and has left an awful lot of jobs on bad terms. Perhaps the best evaluation is that he is very courageous and strong analytically, but may be weak in interpersonal skills. In the end, I believe that I have a better understanding of Thomas Sowell from having read this book. Read, enjoy, and form your own conclusions.
Rating: 3
Summary: A Little Bit 'o Sowell
Comment: Imagine you're a five-year-old Negro orphan without so much as a pot to pee in, growing up in segregated North Carolina in 1935. What can you hope to do when you grow up? Become a farm laborer? Join the Great Migration, to work in northern factories? Or how about, become America's most brilliant social scientist, aka Thomas Sowell?
Economist Thomas Sowell may have graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, and have a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, but the most important "degree" he ever earned surely came from "UCLA" -- "the University at the Corner of Lenox Ave." -- as the old Harlem saying would have it.
Sowell has written on economic theory, race and ethnicity, education, political philosophy, cultural history, even late-talking children, in relatively simple and unpretentious prose. Readers of his curmudgeonly newspaper column know that he was born in the South, grew up in Harlem, dropped out of high school, and served in the United States Marine Corps. Here he fills out that picture. This book is a self-portrait of a man who since childhood has always gone his own way, and spoken his piece, petty tyrants be damned, even if that meant having to back up his words with his fists.
By the time Thomas Sowell was born in North Carolina in 1930, his father, Henry, had died. His mother, "Willie," overwhelmed with four older children to feed on her salary as a domestic, turned to her aunt, Molly Sowell. Molly, already some sixty years old, and her husband (whose name we are never told), adopted the child, Buddy, whom they renamed Thomas Sowell, and raised as their own.
Under the pretext of visiting her aunt, Willie would frequently visit Buddy. But a few years later, she died in childbirth, and Sowell was not to know of his true siblings until he was an adult. As a child, he knew of his aunt and uncle only as "Mama" and "Daddy."
In North Carolina, young Thomas had so few dealings with white folks, that when he saw "yellow-haired" characters in a comic strip, he did not believe that such people existed. When he was nine, "Mama," by now separated from her husband, took him and her grown-up daughters, Ruth and "Birdie," north to Harlem. In New York, the youngster discovered that yellow-haired people really did exist.
Despite his humble beginnings, Sowell considers himself lucky: Lucky that he was spared the worst of southern racism and the destruction of New York City's public schools, and lucky that he was able to establish himself professionally prior to the age of affirmative action, which has since cast a cloud over all blacks' achievements.
Not that Sowell romanticizes his school days. For though he depicts his teachers in New York City as vastly superior to their semi-literate successors, he indicts them as having been consumed with wielding power over children. In young Sowell, who depicts himself as having been an incorrigible smart-ass, more than a few met their match.
Unfortunately, it was not only in institutional settings that Sowell clashed with those who would abuse authority.
As she grew older, "Mama" increasingly became "Mama Dearest," lying and bullying, and even manipulating the police and courts, in seeking to force the teenager to submit to her, and give up any hopes he had of making something of himself. The conflict resulted in Sowell's dropping out of New York's elite, Stuyvesant High School.
Leaving home at the tender age of 17, Sowell subsisted on low-paying, dangerous, unreliable jobs as a messenger and in machine shops. Eventually, he earned his high school equivalency diploma, and after military service attended night school at black Howard University in Washington, D.C., a dismal experience, before being accepted by Harvard.
Sowell shows that already in the early 1970s, students (aided by opportunistic administrators) were telling professors what to do -- including what grades to give them. Such pathologies hastened his departure from academia. I can think of no more damning indictment of academia than that it can welcome with open arms the Andrew Hackers and Leonard Jeffrieses of the world, but has no room for Thomas Sowell.
Noting that he is not even registered to vote, Sowell mocks the notion of his being a Republican operative as a myth spun out of whole cloth by journalistic antagonists such as the recently deceased Carl Rowan. While he has little to say about politicians -- virtually none of it complimentary -- he fondly recalls the two brief encounters he had with President Ronald Reagan.
Sowell thought that Reagan had much to offer black Americans, but lamented that The Great Communicator was lost, when it came to connecting with them.
Sowell briefly notes that he occasionally suffered from racial discrimination. He has three points to make about such matters. 1. Determine that a situation is actually characterized by racial discrimination, rather than some other reason. 2. It is often better to confront racism directly, whether verbally or through a punch in the nose, than through lawsuits and legislation. 3. Perhaps most important, whites who have been caught discriminating against qualified blacks, have tended to compound their misdeed, by then hiring unqualified blacks, based solely on the color of their skin.
Sowell's main shortcoming is in failing to portray his own intellectual development, from his youthful Marxism, to becoming Marx' most trenchant American critic. A secondary weakness is his botching of the rare chronicling of his adult personal life. At one point, Sowell mentions the entry of a new woman into his life, but the next time he mentions a name, it is of a different woman entirely.
As readable as this book is, Sowell is unable or unwilling to meet the standard he set with his earlier works.
In a world of hype, whole herds of writers may claim -- through their press agents -- to be iconoclasts. A Personal Odyssey shows what really goes into leading such a life, and the price it exacts -- a price few are willing to pay.
A Different Drummer, January 3, 2001.
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