Disarmingly candid ... He intertwines his intellectual journey with unexpectedly juicy personal disclosures. By confessing to some reprehensible behavior, Loury says, he hopes to earn his readers’ trust and, paradoxically, their respect and admiration. If this seems like a risky gambit for such a polarizing thinker, you are onto something ... A zestfully written book, packed with humor, pathos and hard-earned wisdom. Even its distasteful revelations are, for the most part, in keeping with Loury’s rigorous ethic of self-scrutiny.
Unlike any economist’s memoir I have ever read ... The annihilating level of detail in Loury’s book convinces you that he is aiming for straight talk, even if candor and honesty aren’t quite the same thing. It’s among this book’s drawbacks that the two Glenn Lourys aren’t persuasively synthesized. Late Admissions is also about 100 pages too long. The writing can be haphazard ... You don’t finish Late Admissions particularly liking Loury, or admiring him. He’s sorry about a lot of the things he’s done. But it’s to his credit that he doesn’t gin up a false catharsis, a ready-made Today Show moment of abiding contrition.
his memoir is so frank that readers may get dizzy from the candor of his revelations, particularly of his (now discontinued) sex and drug binges. But alongside such details is a bracing account of how Mr. Loury came to confront the racial and ideological expectations of a society where a black conservative is anathema to black elites and white liberals alike ... There is a sweetness and vulnerability to Mr. Loury’s search for catharsis-by-confession. He is a highly intelligent man, utterly flawed and irresistibly likable. If we judge him, it’s because he beckons us to do so, a wayward moth offering himself up to a public flame.
