I recommend this book highly for it confirms every conservative critique of the Court's "jurisprudence" from Roe forward. Toobin's writing talent and reporting skills are beyond dispute, but his awareness of the impact of what he has produced is limited.

At the same time I am not sure if Justice Clarence Thomas or even his most admiring reviewer quite grasps yet what the justice has produced in his new autobiography My Grandfather's Son. Ask serious readers and writers who care about the issue of race in America since emancipation, and most will agree that certain books have to be read: Richard Wright's Native Son, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird among them.

Justice Thomas's memoir is now on that list.

I read the book in two sittings, going back and forth to the United States Air Force Academy last weekend. Flight attendants on both trips as well as a passenger asked what book could possibly be so riveting. When I told them the book and its author, the reaction was both shock and in one instance quite obviously dismay --a continuation of the public assault on Thomas that began in 1991, the period at which the book concludes.

But though the attempted "high tech lynching" was a brutal experience, it is just the continuation of a life long series of struggles that leaves the fair reader exhausted and humbled at the road Clarence Thomas has traveled. I cannot do the narrative justice in a couple of paragraphs, and won't try. But if you are at all interested in understanding --really understanding-- not just Justice Thomas but far more importantly the terrible problem of race that our country's founders, then its framers, and then generations of political leaders have constructed for us, you will read this book and insist on others reading it.

Most of the public discussion of the memoir has of course centered on the long ago discredited Anita Hill charges against Clarence Thomas. Prevailing Manhattan-Beltway media elite received wisdom is that Hill was telling the truth when then, as now, even a cursory review of her charges reveal them as laughable, her credibility in tatters before she ever took an oath.

But the attempt by the snarling left to destroy Thomas in order to save the unfettered "right" to destroy unborn life is just side-lighting to the drama that Thomas lived prior to his confirmation, and of almost no use whatsoever in understanding his jurisprudence, easily among the most interesting in decades, and of far more long term consequence than the difference splitting of Justice O'Connor so completely recounted by Jeffrey Toobin.

Clarence Thomas has penned a classic work of American political biography which will rank with Grant's and Nixon's in enduring interest. It is being treated as a dissent now by an elite ideological orthodoxy as rigid as the segregationist south's in its day.

But like Justice Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, My Grandfather's Son is a great work that will have its day. "[I]n view of the constitution," Justice Harlan thundered in denouncing his colleagues acceptance of "separate but equal" segregation in 1896, "in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens." He continued:

There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guarantied by the supreme law of the land are involved.

Justice Thomas began life, truly, as the humblest of Americans, in a poverty of material and spiritual wealth so complete I cannot imagine how he survived it much less rose up from it. The answer, of course, is the God working through the man Thomas credits in the title, as well as his grandmother, and some amazing people along the way, including former Senator John Danforth whose example in this book is a rebuke to anyone blessed with privilege who has not used it. (And to Bobby Knight, in a fashion I will leave to the reader to discover.)

No matter what you think you know about Clarence Thomas, you don't know the half or tenth of it unless and until you have read this book.