Michael Roesch

Socrates might be right that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” but Loury's psychological autopsy exposed me to way more of his corpus delicti than was often comfortable. Most of us eventually have to face one or more of our major failures, but Loury's enormous feet of clay are again and again tripped up by an enlarged ego and his infinitesimal sense of concern for others. Like Narcissus, Loury can't take himself away from his own reflection, and it's only the strong winds of external reality that force him back and forth like a bobblehead between right and wrong actions. That said, the threads Loury so painfully unravels in his book are the same threads weaving all of us together—family, identity, morality---and that makes the book a very worthy read. Yes, the book does not fully answer any of the difficult questions the reader might want answered about the problems associated with race in America, and the conclusion is more an appetizer than a main course, but I feel that I will be digesting this book for a very long, long time.