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A prominent Black social critic recounts a tortuous road to Damascus.

Loury, author of The Anatomy of Inequality, doesn’t seem to care if readers like him: He opens with a confession that he’s lied, cheated, and “abandoned people who needed me,” among other greater and lesser sins. He grew up in a rough neighborhood in Chicago, playing baseball with kids who would die of overdoses, earn life sentences, or, if lucky, survive to work low-wage jobs. So it was with Loury, who found work at Burger King, then a printing plant, falling in with “a self-taught black intellectual of the sort that’s quite common on the South Side.” Gifted at math, the author decided to go to college. As a student at Northwestern, he writes, “At times I felt like the talented Mr. Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith’s chameleonic autodidact (minus the murder and fraud).” During and after college and a professorship at the University of Michigan, Loury shaped himself into a rarity: a Black conservative with tenure in economics at Harvard and an invitation to hang out with Clarence Thomas whenever he liked. He’s since moved over to the left after abandoning long-cherished notions that the free market would take care of everything, including racism. However, along the way—and here’s where a certain tedium enters the narrative—he sneaks out of his married home life, cruises for female companions paid and not, and becomes addicted not just to crack cocaine but to his various vices and schizoid existence. Throughout these portions of the text, the author is decidedly unlikable, but after rehab (“spoiled rich kid or drug-addled zombie or Harvard professor, in the eyes of the hospital staff, we were all the same”), he shook off his demons.

A rueful account of a Jekyll and Hyde life overcome by a hard-fought struggle for redemption.