About the Author

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 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.

Reviews

“The authors superbly deconstruct Thomas’s multiple narratives of critical life-events—the accounts vary depending on his audience—and it says much for their intellectual integrity that though they are clearly critical of their subject, their presentation allows readers to make their own judgments.”—New York Times Book Review

“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, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father

“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 review)

The conservatism of the nation's second African-American Supreme Court justice has made him a pariah in the black community, an irony that centers this probing biography, expanded from the authors' Washington Post Magazine profile. Thomas's rise from disadvantaged circumstances to Yale Law School, a meteoric government career and appointment to Thurgood Marshall's Court seat, Merida and Fletcher note, seems an affirmative action success story. Yet Thomas has opposed affirmative action, prisoners' rights, abortion and other planks of the liberal agenda, leading to ubiquitous complaints-the authors cite black leaders, prison inmates, even Thomas's relatives-that he's forgotten his roots. Merida and Fletcher present a lucid, well-researched account of Thomas's controversial life and jurisprudence, including evidence supporting Anita Hill's sexual harassment allegations, and a nuanced discussion of the politics of black authenticity. They portray Thomas as a conflicted man: a committed conservative with an ethos of self-reliance, who took advantage of affirmative action only to have his achievements tarnished by his own insecurities and others' suspicions of incompetence or hypocrisy. The authors' attempts to link his convictions to his psyche-they make much of his alleged resentment of light-skinned black professional elites-don't always click, but Thomas still emerges as a fascinating and emblematic figure. (Mar. 20) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

"The authors superbly deconstruct Thomas's multiple narratives of critical life-events-the accounts vary depending on his audience-and it says much for their intellectual integrity that though they are clearly critical of their subject, their presentation allows readers to make their own judgments."-New York Times Book Review

"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, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father

"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 review)