The Thomas Sowell Reader

What It Is

A self-selected anthology, published by Basic Books in 2011, running to about 450 pages. Sowell chose the contents himself, drawing on his books, his syndicated columns, his academic articles and his letters, and grouped them by subject: social issues, economics, politics, law, race and ethnicity, education, biographical sketches, and a section he calls Random Thoughts.

The range is the point. A tightly reasoned piece on the economics of housing sits a few pages from a column about baseball, and a memoir of his late-talking childhood near an essay on judicial activism.

He was eighty-one when it appeared. It reads like a man laying out what he has been saying since the 1960s and daring you to find the contradiction.

Why It Matters

Sowell is one of the most cited and least read serious economists in America. He is quoted endlessly in fragments, usually by people who have never opened a book of his, and the fragments make him sound like a slogan machine. He is not. The interest of this collection is that it lets you watch the same mind work across forty years on subjects that have nothing to do with each other, and either the method holds up or it does not.

What holds it together is a handful of ideas he never stopped applying. They are stated plainly, and he applies them without much regard for whom they offend. Watch those ideas hit taxation, then schooling, then race, then late-talking children, and you learn more about how an argument works than any single one of his books can teach you.

It also puts the biographical writing on record, including the sketches of his teachers and of Milton Friedman, which show a warmer man than the columns suggest.

Before You Read

Fifteen to twenty hours, but nobody should read it that way. Take a section at a sitting and stop.

Expect unevenness, and do not hold it against the book. A column written for Thursday's paper cannot carry the weight of a chapter that took a year, and Sowell was honest enough to print both. He also repeats himself. Across five decades the same examples recur, and reading them in bulk feels closer to hearing an argument reinforced than developed.

The Random Thoughts section is aphorism, not analysis. Read it for the wit and do not mistake it for the case.

Which Edition to Read

• The Thomas Sowell Reader (Basic Books, 2011) — recommended. The paperback is the one to own: cheap, thick, and the ideal book to leave on a side table and pick up for twenty minutes. This is Sowell's own selection, so what you are reading is what he thought worth keeping. The cost: an anthology assembled by its author is an anthology with no editor, and it shows. Nobody talked him out of the weaker columns, and there is no introduction to place the pieces in the decades that produced them. View on Amazon →
• The ebook. Genuinely better for this particular book. It is a work you consult rather than read through, and being able to search fifty years of material for what Sowell said about the minimum wage, or about Marx, turns a sampler into a reference. The cost: you lose the physical browse, which is most of what an anthology is for.
• Skip the Reader and go to the individual books. An honest option. If you already know you want the argument at length, Basic Economics, A Conflict of Visions and Knowledge and Decisions are where Sowell is at full stretch, and an anthology can only gesture at them. The cost: you will spend a great deal more money to find out you did not like him.

Start with the Reader. It is the cheapest way to discover whether this is a writer you want to live with, and the three books above will still be there when you finish.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it out of order and read it slowly. No argument is being built from page one, and treating it like a monograph will only tire you.

Notice which columns have aged badly and which have not, then ask what the difference is. It is almost always whether the piece rested on a principle or on a passing political fight, and it is the best short lesson in the difference between opinion writing and thinking that this collection has to offer.

Follow the crumbs. Every section points at a full-length book behind it, and the honest purpose of a reader is to send you to one. If you finish this and buy nothing else, either Sowell has failed or you have.