Rating: 
Summary: A Brilliant Scholar Recounting His Life and Times.
Review: I have recently been interested in reading more of Thomas Sowell's books, having just finished his eye-opening "Inside American Education (1993)" before reading this one. Having read his autobiography, I now have a better appreciation for this man - his love of scholar, intellectual excellence, and most importantly, the truth.Although this entire book is a must-read, I would like to touch on a couple of areas therein that really got my attention. One was Sowell's view on race-based affirmative action. From the very beginning Sowell saw the inherent flaws in this policy, particularly in college admissions. Granting academically underqualified and underprepared minority students to elite and academically intensive universities all in the name of "equality" was, as Sowell saw early on, basically a case of putting students in academic settings there they were sure to fail. It was a recipe for disaster from the outset. In particularly, he saw many college and university administrators bypassing the most qualified minority students in favor of the most ideologically and politically "pro-black" younsters who were just not prepared for the rigors of, say, a Cornell University, where Sowell taught for a time. He adamantly spoke out against this time and again, but to no avail. Which brings me to another aspect of Sowell's life and personality that appealed to me: He was not afraid to question or challenge authority. True, he made many an enemy as a result, but this didn't shake him. In fact, as he points out, the thing that hurts people the most is the truth. He was not afraid to tell the truth, whether anyone like it or not. Thomas Sowell is one of the greatest intellectual minds of our time. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Scholar Recounting His Life and Times.
Review: I have recently been interested in reading more of Thomas Sowell's books, having just finished his eye-opening "Inside American Education (1993)" before reading this one. Having read his autobiography, I now have a better appreciation for this man - his love of scholar, intellectual excellence, and most importantly, the truth. Although this entire book is a must-read, I would like to touch on a couple of areas therein that really got my attention. One was Sowell's view on race-based affirmative action. From the very beginning Sowell saw the inherent flaws in this policy, particularly in college admissions. Granting academically underqualified and underprepared minority students to elite and academically intensive universities all in the name of "equality" was, as Sowell saw early on, basically a case of putting students in academic settings there they were sure to fail. It was a recipe for disaster from the outset. In particularly, he saw many college and university administrators bypassing the most qualified minority students in favor of the most ideologically and politically "pro-black" younsters who were just not prepared for the rigors of, say, a Cornell University, where Sowell taught for a time. He adamantly spoke out against this time and again, but to no avail. Which brings me to another aspect of Sowell's life and personality that appealed to me: He was not afraid to question or challenge authority. True, he made many an enemy as a result, but this didn't shake him. In fact, as he points out, the thing that hurts people the most is the truth. He was not afraid to tell the truth, whether anyone like it or not. Thomas Sowell is one of the greatest intellectual minds of our time. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Scholar Recounting His Life and Times.
Review: I have recently been interested in reading more of Thomas Sowell's books, having just finished his eye-opening "Inside American Education (1993)" before reading this one. Having read his autobiography, I now have a better appreciation for this man - his love of scholar, intellectual excellence, and most importantly, the truth. Although this entire book is a must-read, I would like to touch on a couple of areas therein that really got my attention. One was Sowell's view on race-based affirmative action. From the very beginning Sowell saw the inherent flaws in this policy, particularly in college admissions. Granting academically underqualified and underprepared minority students to elite and academically intensive universities all in the name of "equality" was, as Sowell saw early on, basically a case of putting students in academic settings there they were sure to fail. It was a recipe for disaster from the outset. In particularly, he saw many college and university administrators bypassing the most qualified minority students in favor of the most ideologically and politically "pro-black" younsters who were just not prepared for the rigors of, say, a Cornell University, where Sowell taught for a time. He adamantly spoke out against this time and again, but to no avail. Which brings me to another aspect of Sowell's life and personality that appealed to me: He was not afraid to question or challenge authority. True, he made many an enemy as a result, but this didn't shake him. In fact, as he points out, the thing that hurts people the most is the truth. He was not afraid to tell the truth, whether anyone like it or not. Thomas Sowell is one of the greatest intellectual minds of our time. I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Great expectations....dashed!
Review: I ordered this memoir immediately because I have been a big fan of Sowell's books on economics, politics and race. I was especially interested in his "odyssey" from a Marxist to a free-market economist. Tragically, he fails to bear his soul on this and many other critical issues. If you think this book is about ideas and philosophy, and how they changed over time, think again. You never find out! It is more a series of anecdotes in his childhood and adult life--growing up in Harlem, joining the Marines, going to school at Howard, Harvard, Chicago, teaching at Cornell, UCLA, working at AT&T, the Urban Institute, and finally researching and writing at Hoover. He does spend a great deal of time writing about race relations, why he has been accused of being a recluse since the Reagan era, his success in getting his son to start speaking after age 4, and some insights on his divorce, but if you want to know WHY he opposed the Vietnam War, disagreed with Chicago professor George Stigler on Say's Law, or abandoned Marxism in favor of the free-market economics of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, you will be disappointed. I did enjoy his short encounters with famous economists Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Kenneth Arrow, but he could have said a lot more. Let me give you one example of my frustration: On pp. 276-77, Sowell talks about a quotation from black Air Force General Chappy James that then California Governor Ronald Reagan was especially fond of. Sowell disliked the quote--but never tells us what the quote is! One final annoying drawback: Sowell's autobiography has no index! Grrrrr.
Rating:
Summary: Great expectations....dashed!
Review: I ordered this memoir immediately because I have been a big fan of Sowell's books on economics, politics and race. I was especially interested in his "odyssey" from a Marxist to a free-market economist. Tragically, he fails to bear his soul on this and many other critical issues. If you think this book is about ideas and philosophy, and how they changed over time, think again. You never find out! It is more a series of anecdotes in his childhood and adult life--growing up in Harlem, joining the Marines, going to school at Howard, Harvard, Chicago, teaching at Cornell, UCLA, working at AT&T, the Urban Institute, and finally researching and writing at Hoover. He does spend a great deal of time writing about race relations, why he has been accused of being a recluse since the Reagan era, his success in getting his son to start speaking after age 4, and some insights on his divorce, but if you want to know WHY he opposed the Vietnam War, disagreed with Chicago professor George Stigler on Say's Law, or abandoned Marxism in favor of the free-market economics of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, you will be disappointed. I did enjoy his short encounters with famous economists Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Kenneth Arrow, but he could have said a lot more. Let me give you one example of my frustration: On pp. 276-77, Sowell talks about a quotation from black Air Force General Chappy James that then California Governor Ronald Reagan was especially fond of. Sowell disliked the quote--but never tells us what the quote is! One final annoying drawback: Sowell's autobiography has no index! Grrrrr.
Rating: 
Summary: A useful guide in your own life
Review: 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:
Summary: A useful guide in your own life
Review: 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:
Summary: A Little Bit 'o Sowell
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: The Epitome of Excellence
Review: In my opinion, this book, as well as so many of his publications, should be read by everyone. Thomas Sowell personifies the human constitutional qualities of perseverance and tenacity. Abundant praise for his continued efforts focused on teaching people to Think...which seems to becoming a rare commodity. He has a special quality of making one think...even if you don't want to; demonstrating..."There is no expedient a man will not resort to in order to avoid the labor of thinking." His candor(sometimes with a touch of humor)is to be admired and respected. He is indeed an intelligent different drummer. A Personal Odyssey will definitely wet your appetite for additional publications by Thomas Sowell. Quite simply, he needs to be taught in our schools. After reading this book, you will most likely agree...Thomas Sowell needs to be [duplicated]!
Rating:
Summary: Academia's Worst Nightmare
Review: It will be no surprise to anyone familiar with Thomas Sowell's political views, as well as his fierce commitment to academic integrity, that he experienced numerous scrapes with administrators and students during the decades in which he taught economics at various universities. Convinced that he could no longer usefully serve the corrupt establishment that had swallowed higher education by the seventies, Sowell left the teaching profession for a fellowship with the much-revered Hoover Institute. In a very short time he became one of the most well-known economists in America and was even rumored to be in line for a job with the Reagan administration. However, he was never actually offered such a job. Instead, he continued to write brilliantly and help shape the nation's intellectual and political outlooks.
As a black man who bucks the conventional civil rights "wisdom," Sowell has been a lightning rod over the years for those hostile to the idea that black people can think independently of the group. His willingness to dissent from the party line indicates a courage that few in the public sphere emulate. His story only serves to reinforce his integrity and demonstrates his unwavering belief in himself and his principles. Despite a humble background and a life that included many obstacles to success, he was able to get the most out of himself while winning a measure of respect that few in academia or politics ever enjoy.
Like all autobiographies, "A Personal Odyssey" is extremely one-sided. Therefore, it is often difficult to distinguish between Sowell's recollection of an event and the truth. According to him, he was never personally responsible for his run-ins with fellow university staff or students; the usual culprits were the capitulation of administrators and the laziness of students. A thoughtful reader, of course, might wonder if Sowell's own stubborness played a role in many of these confrontations. He himself would likely admit that he is not the easiest person to get along with, like many who are uncompromising on certain principles. Certainly, readers can't expect a person to have a balanced or unbiased view of himself. So the book does not suffer from the author's one-sided account.
The reason this book does not rate 5 stars is that the author only gives us minimal information about how he came to hold his opinions on political, cultural, and economic matters. Like many partisans of the right, Sowell once subscribed to socialism. In fact, in his younger days he was a full-blown Marxist, as he recounts in the book. Unfortunately, he gives little explanation for his move to the conservative/libertarian side of the spectrum. He tells his readers that certain events caused him to change his mind, but he doesn't offer much detail on the specific events that influenced this transformation or why they had the impact they had. A more lucid discussion of his political conversion would be much appreciated.
Though "A Personal Odyssey" suffers from insufficient detail on the author's intellectual journey from left to right, it is a very enjoyable piece nonetheless. Filled with Sowell's characteristic wisdom and good sense, it also displays his tremendous wit. Some of the funniest moments are when he challenges the thought process of his radical black friend Al. Sowell's story makes for a great and quick read. It was so entertaining that my mother practically read the whole book in one flight to England. Highly recommended, regardless of one's political views.
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