I found a review of the book Q mentions in his last post.

I'm gonna post the whole thing since some people on dial-up Internet access may be interested in reading it.

Metrotimes {Detroit}

ONE SACRY GUY
by Larry Gabriel
5/16/2007

"I'm not sure that anyone really needs to read a biography of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. But I must admit that Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas ($26.95, Doubleday, 432 pp.), by Washington Post reporters Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher, provides fascinating insights into the character of the man so many of us on the left have come to vilify.

And the new book's title is dead on. The man is uncomfortable in so many ways. Indeed, he seems uncomfortable in his very skin. And that is the crux of the man. He is a conservative's conservative whose votes and opinions fly opposite the major opinions, judgments and philosophies of the civil rights era. And he seems to reserve a special hatred for affirmative action.

Merida and Fletcher's book goes a long way in explaining the contrarian bellicosity that Thomas displays. He never got over the slights and injustices that school kids mete out to each other. Thomas was teased as a child for his Geechee-Gullah speech patterns, for his dark skin, for his Negroid features, for his kinky hair. And all this teasing came from other black kids, who Thomas viewed as the lighter-skinned black middleclass — the families of doctors and lawyers who didn't accept his entrepreneurial grandfather who made a good living delivering heating oil.

At the same time he felt himself an outcast among the white students at the private Catholic schools he attended. So Thomas grew up a man without a country — adrift with nothing to cling to but his increasingly rigid beliefs. He had a growing disgust with the way poor blacks became dependent on entitlements. He seems to think that whites see his achievements as tokenism or the result of quotas. The bottom line is most professional blacks deal with this attitude on a regular basis, but it doesn't turn into a bitter crusade against the very thing that helped them along the way. Nor does it lessen their professional aptitude and effectiveness.

The guy seems to have so much inner conflict that you begin to feel sorry for him. Then you look at the votes he has cast, and your compassion becomes tempered by how much he has harmed progressive causes, and how much potential he has to cause further harm. He favors capital punishment, supports executive power of the sort President Bush flouts, and isn't big on the rights of those accused of crimes. He voted against the University of Michigan in the affirmative action case that came before the court in 2005.

Thomas is an odd character who is a friend to Rush Limbaugh and former Texas U.S. Rep. Dick Armey; he and Armey are fishing buddies. And Thomas defended Strom Thurmond from charges of racism because the senator spoke nicely to him when he first arrived in Washington. He seems to long to be accepted by black people but lives an insulated life protected from those who he feels have turned against him. He doesn't forget either, keeping a detailed mental checklist of those wrongs.

Although Anita Hill's is the name most often connected with Thomas' in public memory, there's relatively little discussion here of the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings where she accused her former boss of sexual harassment and nearly scuttled his ascension to the high court.

Still the authors make clear that if all the available evidence had been allowed in the hearing, Thomas would probably not have been confirmed

The odd inner workings of the Supreme Court come into focus in the latter part of the book. In some cases, Supreme Court justices' opinions have evolved as they study and argue about the U.S. Constitution. Don't expect Thomas to change. He is rigid and seems to have little curiosity that would change his hardened mind-set.

Discomfort is well-written and told in anecdotes that make for good storytelling. However, when you step back and consider the man, Clarence Thomas is scary."

http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=10502