The school of very hard knocks

The Economist reviews My Grandfather's Son by Clarence Thomas.

He pulled himself up by raw intellect and study, with the encouragement of stern nuns. He trained to become a priest, but dropped out when a classmate exulted in the murder of Martin Luther King. “Had the Church been as adamant about ending racism then as it is about ending abortion now,” he writes, his life might have taken a different path. His grandfather wept when he quit the seminary, and threw him out of the house. (They were later reconciled.)