A Personal Odyssey

Because Thomas Sowell is one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century, I felt compelled to read his autobiography. I'm not suggesting that I wanted to read it, I felt compelled to do so. I've always admired Sowell's positions (this is not to say that I agree with him) and have suggested that my minority students use him as a role model. After reading his autobiography, I realize that thinking this way was a mistake. Sowell must be a role model for all students (regardless or race) and for all professors. Several aspects of this book struck a cord within me.First although I always admired Sowell, but I never suspected that he had anything that came close to what I would call a sense of humor. He never smiles during a TV interview (understandable after reading his book). His writing is always scholarly and emotionally detached. However, the pranks he pulled while a Marine were hilarious and made me laugh aloud. It wasn't what I was expecting of Sowell. Second, much of what I learned about him on the TV news was false. Within the pages of this book, I was quite shocked to read about his political and economic positions during the Reagan administration. News reports were outrageously inaccurate. I always pictured him as a "Black Republican." In reality, he never fit into that category. At best, he could be described as a libertarian. More accurately, he ignores ideology and selects a position that includes some empirical support. The bottom line is: Sowell's perspective is thoughtful and he embraces positions that are "right" rather than popular. He has never followed the path of least resistance except for one possible exception.I find only one sour note in the entire book. While working for US Government, he was confronted with two conflicting theories regarding wage control for sugar manufacturing in Puerto Rico. He was the only economist in the department that conceptualized a research design to resolve the theoretical conflict. Because of some bureaucratic agendas within our government, he was unable to acquire the data. The theory was never tested and this saddens me. It is uncharacteristic of Sowell to surrender so easily. Based on the rest of his autobiography, I am quite surprised that he never returned to the issue. I'm sure he could get grant funding for this unfinished business.This is a delightful book. It is humorous and insightful. Sowell sees himself as unassuming. The best single word to describe him is courageous. I wish I read this book sooner. It is quite inspiring.

Sydney M. Williams“A Personal Odyssey”August 13, 2020“Although marching to your own drummer has its downsides, both personally and professionally, it also made me no stranger to controversy.” Thomas Sowell (1930-) A Personal Odyssey, 2000This memoir was written twenty years ago, so some will have read it. I had not. Sowell is a man I have long admired for his independent thinking on many issues. Trained as an economist, he writes as well on education and race, and of how politics, protests and policy prescriptions influenced his thinking.Like Odysseus’ return from Troy, we follow him from birth and young boyhood in rural North Carolina, through his school years in Harlem, and his leaving home at age seventeen. We follow him into the Marine Corps, and we learn of his years in college and graduate school, of marriage and children. We read of his years of teaching, writing and thinking, and, finally to his Ithaca, Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where he researches and writes – a passage through trials to triumph.He was born in 1930. His father died before he arrived and his mother, who could not afford to feed and care for him, had to give him up to his father’s Aunt Molly. The poverty in which he lived was bleak. His first home: “Like most of the houses in the area, ours had no such frills as electricity, central heating, or hot running water…The toilet was a little shed on the back porch.” At age nine, his family moved to New York City, to a shared apartment in Harlem. In 1944, his intelligence got him admitted to Stuyvesant High School where he first spent time with white children. But he quit before graduation. He worked and went into the Marine Corps: “Never in my life did race mean less than during those two months at Parris Island. The Drill Instructors saw their job as making everybody miserable, and they did so without regard to race, color, creed or national origin.”Honorably discharged, he passed exams allowing him to enter Howard University, but soon realized that there “was no way for my mind to develop in the stultifying atmosphere there.” He transferred to Harvard, from which he graduated Magna Cum Laude. From there it was on to Columbia where, under Arthur Burns, he wrote his master’s thesis on Marx’s business cycle theory. He received a PhD from the University of Chicago, with Milton Friedman as his advisor. His thesis was on Say’s Law, which says that production is the source of demand. In one of Friedman’s courses he was assigned Friedrich Hayek’s essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” which “showed the role of a market economy in utilizing the fragmented knowledge scattered among vast numbers of people.”As a black man, civil rights were important. Everyone, he knew, should be equal before the law. “But,” he wrote, “to expect civil rights to solve our economic and social problems was barking up the wrong tree...” He saw quality education as providing the best route out of poverty but did not see that as the plan of civil rights activists. “In education, the agenda was racial integration in general, including busing. Discussions of first-rate all-black schools were a distraction from that agenda.” Busing, in the 1970s, had become a symbolic action. “My research on affirmative action likewise convinced me that it was counterproductive for its avowed purpose, except for a relatively few affluent individuals.” In last Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Barton Swaim wrote, “Thomas Sowell and others have shown that choice and competition would benefit black children far more than doubling or tripling funds for public schools, but white liberals and black civil-rights leaders studiously ignore it.”What struck this reader is his common sense and his wish for other blacks to have the advantages he had. He credits his success to genetics and to the environment in which he has lived. A mathematics gene was common in the family, as were other characteristics: “Some remarkable similarities in personality traits also showed up as between me and my siblings, even though we were raised in separate households hundreds of miles apart.” Environment was important. He left the south “before I would have fallen irretrievably far behind in inferior schools,” and then passed through public schools in New York, “at a time when they were better than they had been for the European immigrant children of a generation earlier and far better than they would be for black children of a later era.”His story is personal; we meet his son John, a brilliant child but a late talker, a condition that prompted his writing Late-Talking Children, one of the more than thirty books he has written. Summing up his life thus far, he added: “With all that I went through, it now seems in retrospect almost as if someone had decided there should be a man with all the outward indications of disadvantage, who nevertheless had the key inner advantages needed to advance.”Sowell is an icon of conservatives, but he is not political. He notes how he developed a “…lifelong immunity to Potomac fever.” Asked to join the Reagan Administration, he demurred. His last membership in a political party was as a Democrat; he became an Independent in 1972. He does not have, he wrote, “…the political skills or temperament to accomplish anything that would justify the aggravation that going to Washington would involve.” He is an intellectual, with an interest in truth based on facts, not policies based on politics of identity. While his common sense would be refreshing in Washington, his wisdom is available to all who can read. This book is a good place to start.

I had no idea who Thomas Sowell was before a friend recommended this book to me. I get the impression that that was fortunate, because as Sowell himself explains in his later chapters, it seems that popular media outlets have branded him as a "Black conservative." The fact that he specifically objected to that label and force the first media outlet to use it to put scare quotes around "conservative" if they were going to use the word to describe him at all seems not to have mattered.What this ultimately is is a well-written and refreshingly analytical account of a life that happened at a very interesting time. I was frankly surprised by how engrossed I was in reading about ordinary incidents in the life of a complete stranger, so he must have quite a storytelling touch as well.We follow Sowell from his days growing up one generation removed from slavery and too young to realize that his family lives in poverty through his dropping out of high school and spending years in manual labor and the military before he finally, somehow naturally arrives in academia and becomes one of the most in-demand economists of the 20th century.It is an enlightening journey to say the least, and I would encourage any American to spend the time to take it with him.

I love the "tell it like it is" Dr. Sowell shares in this book. It's filled with incredible academic and common sense nuggets brought out by various vignettes in his life. This book is to be reread and cherished for its wisdom and insights.

Thomas Sowell’s autobiography is very readable and compelling. His life has been extremely challenging and difficult at times. And yet he has not given way to victimhood or triumphalism. His story is well worth reading.

AWESOME

Wonderful story of an excepcional man.

Orphaned shortly after birth, Sowell began his life journey in the 1930s. As a child, he ranked amongst the top in his class, whilst under the thumb of his overbearing and intruding Aunt, who was also his adopter. His unwillingness to submit to his Aunt's rule, eventually, got him kicked out of the house, as a teenager, and put an abrupt and bitter end to his schooling. After a stint as a photographer in the Marine Corps, he returned to work in a machine factory, attending night lessons at Howard University. Recommendations by professors at Howard, coupled with strong test scores, earned him admission to Harvard, where his inner drive and unwavering fortitude — recurrent forces in his life's odyssey — propelled him, from Ds and Fs, to graduate Magna cum laude, and set in motion his illustrious academic career.Despite embellishments being obviously clear in places throughout the book, and certain events being dramatized, "A Personal Odyssey" will remain on my bookshelf as a fantastic and brilliant account of a story where human endeavour overcomes all odds.

Some of this material - e.g. the first chapter - can be found in Sowell's earlier works, so initially I was a little disappointed, however it quickly moves on to new material. Readers familiar with the genius of Tom Sowell's insights, and his capacity to pack so much meaning into a single, simple paragraph, will not be disappointed by this work.

The first part of this autobiography was really interesting, simply because Thomas Sowell had an interesting first 30 years or so. However, the latter part was mainly about his many moves from one university and institute to another, driven mainly by petty infighting and a seeming inability to be satisfied with anything he found. To some extent the book became a catalogue of 'one damned thing after another'. Had he been more of a storyteller than an economist this slight failing might have been avoided.I think Sowell is a very good thinker with lots of common sense and an ability to communicate ideas simply, but I didn't warm to him as much as I thought I would. Even so, I would still recommend this book to anyone who is interested in reading about one black man who doesn't put all the blame on white people for the failings of many American blacks.