A Personal Odyssey
Audible Audiobook – UnabridgedThomas Sowell (Author), & 2 more
4.8 out of 5 stars 536 ratings
Here is the gritty, powerful story of Thomas Sowell's life-long education in the school of hard knocks, a journey that took him from Harlem to the Marines, the Ivy League, and a career as a controversial writer, teacher, and economist in government and private industry. It is also the story of the dramatically changing times in which this personal odyssey took place.
The vignettes of the people and places that made impressions on Sowell at various stages of his life range from the poor and powerless to the mighty and the wealthy, from a home for homeless boys to the White House. More than an account of Sowell's life, this is also the story of the people who gave him their help, their support, and their loyalty, as well as those who demonized him and knifed him in the back. It is a study not just of one life, but also of life itself, with all its exhilaration, pain, constant striving, and deserved success.
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©2000 Thomas Sowell (P)2001 Blackstone Audio Inc.
Listening Length
10 hours and 54 minutes
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Read & ListenListening Length 10 hours and 54 minutes
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Sydney Williams
5.0 out of 5 stars A black intellectual's personal journeyReviewed in the United States on August 13, 2020
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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, 2000
This 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.
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5.0 out of 5 stars A refreshingly analytical mindReviewed in the United States on July 27, 2022
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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.
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Benjamin W. Slivka
4.0 out of 5 stars Sowell looks back on 70 years of life, sporadicallyReviewed in the United States on August 1, 2020
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I am a big fan of Dr. Sowell’s thinking and writing, I have read only a few of his many books, and it only occurred to me to read his Odyssey after he recently turned 90.
His personality certainly comes through loud and clear. He has definite opinions, he does not compromise, he does not suffer fools, his private life is none of your business, and he has little use for politics or politicians. He testified to Congress at one point and declared he does not even vote.
The best parts of the book — and the most detailed — are his descriptions of his early life: his family situation, the many moves they made, his triumphs and failures in K-12 school, his pride in his academic achievements, the many different manual labor jobs he took on, being drafted into the US Marine Corps, and getting back to civilian life. He takes time to describe and thank the individuals who helped him in big ways along his journey.
Given his long tough road the rough life — he finally earned his PhD from U. Chicago at age 38 — he certainly has a robust experience of the real world to inform his ideas and views. Backed of course by exhaustive research.
He also describes many ills of “affirmative action” as it was beginning to take root in the late 1960s. He was firmly convinced of the damage AA would do especially to blacks.
So while there is a lot to like here, I think it would have been more satisfying for the reader if Dr. Sowell had explained how he made the transition from being an avowed Marxist to a fan of freedom, markets, and limited government. And he spends so little time on his personal life that we get a very incomplete portrait of the whole man. We learn almost nothing about his first wife (not even her name), and his second wife (of 19 years at the time of publication) is an attorney named Mary, but she gets only a sentence or two here and there.
Many very successful academics are Aspergian...somewhere on the autism spectrum. These individuals emphasize “systematizing” over “empathizing”, as Simon Baron Cohen characterizes their mental abilities.
There are not many videos of Sowell, and most of them are interviews or staged discussions, and he doesn’t come across as particularly Aspergian in those settings. But when he describe his son John with his “late talking”, superior memory, attention to detail, and intense focus — that sounded very Aspergian.and then he describes a survey he did of other families with late-talking children, and they profile as classically Aspergian: engineers, pilots, scientists, and mathematicians.
So I liked the book, I got additional insights into Sowell, and I expect his personal life will remain a mystery!
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tigertiger-burning bright
5.0 out of 5 stars up to Dr Sowell's usual standardReviewed in the United Kingdom on September 4, 2020
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I recently discovered Dr Sowell on Youtube and have been reading as many of his books as I can afford. Also watching his interviews with Peter Robinson. He has a brain the size of a planet and of course it is only his intellect coupled with anti-woke views which prevent him being better known. If you are nauseated by the lefty snowflakes running academia and politics at present, then read Dr Sowell for light relief.
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Justin
5.0 out of 5 stars A Personal Odyssey is a great account of the fantastic life story of a brilliant manReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 21, 2021
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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.
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maria lundberg
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read book!Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 23, 2021
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A must read!
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars The Logical Black Economist and Commentator who fits no StereotypeReviewed in the United Kingdom on May 8, 2016
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Typically forthright, logical and (probably) accurate, Sowell close to his uncompromising best
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Tim
5.0 out of 5 stars Great read if you like SowellReviewed in Canada on October 23, 2014
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A totally fascinating story that is well written. It is fun to see how event's in Sowell's life influenced his paradigms and ultimately how it all played out into his major books. Well worth the read if you appreciate Sowell's other work.
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