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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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MAVERICK

Jason L. Riley

A Biography of Thomas Sowell

A biography of Thomas Sowell, one of America's most influential conservative thinkers.
Thomas Sowell is one of the great social theorists of our age. In a career spanning more than a half century, he has written over thirty books, covering topics from economic history and social inequality to political theory, race, and culture. His bold and unsentimental assaults on liberal orthodoxy have endeared him to many readers but have also enraged fellow intellectuals, the civil-rights establishment, and much of the mainstream media. The result has been a lack of acknowledgment of his scholarship among critics who prioritize political correctness.

In the first-ever biography of Sowell, Jason L. Riley gives this iconic thinker his due and responds to the detractors. Maverick showcases Sowell's most significant writings and traces the life events that shaped his ideas and resulted in a Black orphan from the Jim Crow South becoming one of our foremost public intellectuals.

Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several previous books, including Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.
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Published 2021-05-25 by Basic Books

Comments

There are two important ambitions at work in this book. The first gives historical context to Thomas Sowell's extraordinary genius. The second shows how his work spawned a new, post-60s conservative consciousness in black America. It looks with openness and courage at the often-awkward encounter between conservatism and racial conflicts. But most of all, this is the inspiring story of one of the greatest American thinkers who has ever lived.

quote Shelby Steele, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Shame

Maverick is a brilliant intellectual biography of one of the most important thinkers of our time. Jason Riley writes lucidly and engagingly, illuminating ideas of Sowell's that are more timely today than ever, dispelling many myths along the way.

quote Amy Chua, Yale Law professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations

Thomas Sowell is among the most brilliant thinkers in the world today - deep, original, creative, fearless, intimidatingly erudite. His gripping and improbable life story can only magnify one's awe at this astonishing man's accomplishments.

quote Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and the author of How the Mind Works and Enlightenment Now

With the publication of "Maverick," Jason Riley has rendered an enormous service by providing a compelling, informed and elegant intellectual biography of the great Thomas Sowell. It was obviously a labor of love. As a professional economist and Windy City native, I especially appreciated Riley's nuanced, deeply researched account of Sowell's roots in the Chicago School of economic thought, as it was led by Milton Friedman and George Stigler in the 1950s and 1960s.

quote Glenn Loury, Professor of Economics, Brown University

Enlightened opinion has it that the views of conservative black thinkers are boilerplate canards dismissible with a few statistics. Enlightened opinion is also uninformed by - and quite dismissible in the light of - the life's work of Thomas Sowell. At last a biography that shows how and why.

quote John McWhorter, Professor of Linguistics at Columbia University, Contributing Editor at the Atlantic, and Host of Slate's Lexicon Valley