“ALL YOU NEED, besides the cocaine, is a lighter, water, baking soda, some Q-Tips, high-proof alcohol, a ceramic mug, and a piece of cheesecloth or an old T-shirt,” writes Glenn Loury in his riveting Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. The book is surely the only memoir by an Ivy League economist that includes a recipe for crack cocaine along with technical discussions of Karl Marx, Ludwig von Mises, Fried-rich Hayek, and Albert O. Hirschman.
Born in 1948 and raised working class on Chicago’s predominantly black South Side, Loury tells a story of self-invention, ambition, hard work, addiction, and redemption that channels Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism & Freedom. An alternative title might have been “Rise…
