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A PERSONAL ODYSSEY
by
Thomas Sowell
Review by
Mark Webster
Thomas Sowell is an economist popular with Libertarians because of
his insistence on hard work, common sense, and personal responsibility.
He has argued that government “benefits”
only aid the small band of self
anointed visionaries who run the programs.
He is the author of books such as The
Vision of the Anointed and The Quest for Cosmic Justice.
This book chronicles Sowell’s odyssey from childhood poverty in
North Carolina to his present position as Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution at Stanford University. His
father died before Sowell was born. His
mother, already the mother of four, gave him away to his aunt, Mamie
“Molly” Sowell, to raise. This family secret was kept from Sowell for years.
He was close to his adoptive parents and their youngest daughter.
His brothers and sister knew about him;
he did not know about them. His
adoptive family broke up, and he and Mamie and some female cousins moved
to New York. In my opinion,
for the rest of his life Sowell searched for a father figure, but no one
was good enough.
From this strange, Faulknerian beginning was launched a contrary
man who seems to have spent long stretches of his life alone in a room,
creating the Thomas Sowell we know. As
a child, he tried to force a mother dog
to nurse its pups. From
that, he learned a lesson useful for life: pups must be weaned for their
own good. He attended
Stuyvesant High School in New York, a fine academic school, but dropped
out after a spat with his mother and local authorities.
Ironically, the happiest time in his early life was when he worked
nights in a machine shop on the lower east side while trying to scrap by
on his own. He eventually was
drafted by the Marines where, despite the fact that he escaped being
shipped to Korea and was assigned to cushy photographic duties,
he was nearly court martialed and was always in trouble.
He then entered Howard University, which he found not serious
enough about intellectual work. Even
though he was a twenty-four year old high school dropout with a B- grade
average, a GED, and high College Board test sores, Harvard accepted Sowell
as a transfer student. Harvard was the making of Sowell, because it forced him to
excel. He eventually
graduated magna cum laude with a degree in economics and a senior
thesis on Marx. He went on to
Columbia University, hoping to do graduate work under George J. Stigler,
who had just left for the University of Chicago.
After completing his Master’s thesis on Marx’s business cycle
under the tutelage of Arthur F. Burns,
he began working on a Ph.D. with
the guidance, finally, of
George Stigler, an eventual
Nobel Prize winner. Sowell
was not easy to work with, but he completed his course work, began
teaching at various colleges, and
completed his dissertation on Say’s Law.
At Chicago he read Hayek’s essay, “The Use of Knowledge In
Society,” which twenty years later inspired him to write a book titled Knowledge
and Decisions. He was
also influenced by the pragmatist philosophers William James and C.S.
Pierce.
Scholarship was his real interest;
teaching was a nuisance. Although
he became a tenured professor at U.C.L.A.,
he eventually escaped to the quiet rooms of various think tanks.
Although married twice and the father of a daughter and a late
talking son for whom he showed real concern, family life did not satisfy
him. The politics of
faculties and government jobs never suited him.
He refused to let liberals or conservatives use him as a racial
mascot. Although he was a
registered Democrat in 1972, it does not appear he ever voted or was
affiliated with any political party after that.
He makes it clear that he was no product of affirmative action,
having landed a teaching job before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and
tenured long before federal “goals and timetables.”
This book is dull. The
incidents of Sowell’s life are not exciting.
The dialogue he uses for conversations is wooden and not
believable. For nearly fifty
years Sowell has sat in his room writing books.
This would have been a better book if he had done what he is good
at – chronicling the ideas that have influenced his philosophical
development rather than settling personal scores.
Editor’s note: For a more positive review of this book in a previous issue
of JeffersonReview.com, see:
http://www.jeffersonreview.com/articles/2000/121100/Book
Review of A Personal Odyssey, by Thomas Sowell.htm
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