I’m a 65-year-old African American. I was excited enough by the election of the nation’s first black president that I would have cut him a thousand miles of slack. But the last thing I expected was that I would watch him meekly accept humiliation by his political opponents. And the second last thing I expected was that I would go into 2012 looking at the upcoming presidential election as a lesser-of-two-evils affair.

It’s too bad Michael Dawson isn’t a better writer. That, at least, might have made Not in Our Lifetimes less of a slog. Instead, the book is turgid, larded with the jargon of academic political science, and, in the end, not terribly enlightening.

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Kevin Merida & Michael A. Fletcher’s biography of Clarence Thomas