SUPREME DISCOMFORT(ISBN=) 英文原版

Advance Praise for Supreme
Discomfort:
“Clarence Thomas, even as the quiet
justice, is a clanging symbol of politics and race in our time. I
can’t think of two writers I’d rather have cut through the
cacophony of the Thomas mythology than Kevin Merida and Michael A.
Fletcher. In Supreme Discomfort, they have found the divided
soul that divides a nation.” —David Maraniss, author of First in
His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton

“Scrupulously fair and endlessly entertaining. Supreme
Discomfort by Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher is the
definitive work on the Supreme Court’s most elusive—and
fascinating—personality.” —Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Run of
His Life and Too Close to Call, legal affairs analyst
for CNN, and staff writer at The New Yorker.

“An engrossing biography of a conflicted man . . . [Merida and
Fletcher] have done a superb job with this both harsh and
sympathetic life of Clarence Thomas . . . an unflinching look at
success and race in America.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

There is no more powerful, detested, misunderstood African
American in our public life than Clarence Thomas. Supreme
Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas is a haunting
portrait of an isolated and complex man, savagely reviled by much
of the black community, not entirely comfortable in white society,
internally wounded by his passage from a broken family and rural
poverty in Georgia, to elite educational institutions, to the
pinnacle of judicial power. His staunchly conservative positions on
crime, abortion, and, especially, affirmative action have exposed
him to charges of heartlessness and hypocrisy, in that he is
himself the product of a broken home who manifestly benefited from
racially conscious admissions policies.

Supreme Discomfort is a superbly researched and reported
work that features testimony from friends and foes alike who have
never spoken in public about Thomas before—including a candid
conversation with his fellow justice and ideological ally, Antonin
Scalia. It offers a long-overdue window into a man who straddles
two different worlds and is uneasy in both—and whose divided
personality and conservative political philosophy will deeply
influence American life for years to come.

KEVIN MERIDA is an associate editor at the Washington
Post. He has been a national political reporter for the paper,
a feature writer for its “Style” section, and a columnist for the
Post’s Sunday magazine. In 2000 he was named Journalist of
the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists. MICHAEL
A. FLETCHER covers the White House for the Washington Post,
where he has been a reporter since 1995. He has previously covered
education and race relations, chronicling issues including the
racial achievement gap, racial profiling, criminal justice
disparities, and the battle over the future of affirmative
action.