Clarence Thomas and the tough love crowd : counterfeit heroes and unhappy truths /

Roberts has taken upon himself the task of discrediting, indeed, humiliating, several African American theorists of conservative persuasion. Most prominent among these is Clarence Thomas of the US Supreme Court. Unfortunately for his readers Roberts does not satisfy himself with an intellectual criticism of their work. Rather, he repeatedly savages the "neocons" with snide, sarcastic, and nasty attacks using intemperate language and terms. His victims are "oppressive," "zany," and "failed" with their "gaffes" and "somnambulant violence," "more than dumb, immoral"; their ideas are ultimately "bullshit." Roberts's outbursts are simply immature. In fact, this relentless and mean spirited criticism renders his book a challenge to the reader who would endure to its finish. One might accuse the author of some misleading writing of his own. Thomas, whose name leads the title, and presumably attracts potential purchasers, is a minor figure. Pretentious and tiresome though he is here, perhaps better work can be looked for from the young author another time. Meanwhile, this tedious tirade can be overlooked by general readers and specialists alike. T. P. Campbell; Northeastern University School of Law

Oxford and Harvard Law graduate Roberts offers spirited, and partly effective, critiques of the ``unstable dogmas'' of a disparate group of black neoconservatives. However, his continued reference to the term ``Negro crits'' to describe anticonservative thinkers like Derrick Bell is an odd tic. After briefly taking on Shelby Steele's rhetoric of individualism and Thomas Sowell's attacks on civil rights as a displacement of fact by belief, the author proceeds for a deeper-and more abstruse-look at law and lawyers usually considered liberal. He finds disingenuous Yale Law professor Stephen Carter's idea that judgeships are more private distinctions than sites of political power, and he tracks Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy's pre-tenure ``confirmation conversion'' from activist scholar to disinterested idealist. He also takes a thoughtful and sometimes tart look at Clarence Thomas's early Supreme Court opinions: ``justice is apparently someone else's work.'' He concludes with an attack on writer V.S. Naipaul's view of postcolonial politics: ``the form of his work entails the worth of human life, while the infused vision denies it.'' (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved