Saturday, October 13, 2007 5:34 AM
Blawg Book Highlighter #5: My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir
Throughout his divisive nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court and his 15 years on the nation's top court, Clarence Thomas has been mostly silent.
Thomas, 59, the second African American to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, has spoken little publicly about his contentious nomination in 1991, during which University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill accused him of sexually harassing her when the two of them had worked together at the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
As a jurist, Thomas is well-known for listening rather than actively asking questions during oral arguments of the Court.
It is that silence, arguably more than his being the most conservative justice on a decidedly conservative Court or even the apparent contradictions between his own life and his judicial philosophy (i.e., railing against the same affirmative action programs from which he benefited), that makes Thomas a compelling figure. It is also why his memoir, "My Grandfather's Son," is making news and flying off the bookshelves ( Amazon.com sales ranking of No. 3 earlier this week).
In the book, for which he reportedly received $1.5 million, Thomas traces his unlikely ascent as a young boy who grew out of poverty and hunger in rural Georgia to become the nation's 106th Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, a path on which he largely credits his grandfather, Myers Anderson, for leading him towards.
But it is his fiery attacks on Anita Hill, the media, and what he calls the liberal political elite that sought to derail his confirmation, that has made news and arguably made Thomas an even more polarizing figure.
It should be no surprise then that book critics find both merit and fault in Thomas's memoir. Edward Lazarus writes for the LA Times: "Whether Thomas' much-anticipated memoir will advance this cause is doubtful. Thomas' supporters will cheer his often eloquent and always feisty accounts in which every liberal idea is derided as a foolish "piety" belied by his life experience. But his polemical, score-settling approach is likely only to deepen the enmity of his detractors." And Jabari Asim writes for the Washington Post: "This memoir will not sway those who oppose his fierce, unapologetic conservatism, but it does provide a fascinating glimpse into a tortured, complex and often perplexing personality. Near the end of the book he discusses a desire to allow his life "to be seen as the story of an ordinary person who, like most people, had worked out his problems step by unsure step." In that he has succeeded."
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Randy Richardson is an author, humorist, former journalist, and a lawyer. His fiction debut, Lost in the Ivy, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of Chicago's storied Wrigley Field, won the Writers Marketing Association's “Fresh Voices” Book Award and the Illinois Woman's Press Association's Mate E. Palmer Communications Contest. He writes the Dad Libs column for SanityCentral.com and is a frequent contributor to Chicago Parent magazine. In his day job, he is an attorney for the Social Security Administration’s disability appeals branch. At night and during lunch breaks, he serves as president of the Chicago Writers Association (chicagowrites.org) and works on his second novel while a 4-year-old tugs on his legs. Visit his website at www.lostintheivy.com.
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