Late Admissions
Confessions of a Black Conservative
Format:Paperback
Publisher:WW Norton & Co
Published:11th Nov '25
£15.99
Supplier delay - available to order, but may not be available until after 20th January 2026.
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£25.99(9780393881349)

Glenn C. Loury is often radically opposed to the political mainstream and delights in upending what’s expected of a Black public figure. But more than the arguments themselves, his public life has been characterised by fearlessness and a willingness to recalibrate strongly held and forcefully argued beliefs. Loury grew up on the south side of Chicago, earned a PhD in MIT’s economics programme and became the first Black tenured professor of economics at Harvard at the age of thirty-three. He has been, at turns, a young father, a drug addict, an adulterer, a psychiatric patient, a born-again Christian, a lapsed born-again Christian and a Black Reaganite. In Late Admissions, Loury examines what it means to chart a sense of self over the course of a tempestuous but well-considered life.
"Breathtakingly good, and extraordinarily candid. Loury is perhaps the best writer of nonfiction in America, but Late Admissions advances well beyond that. Its self-reflexive, ‘house of mirrors’ structure reminds me of Amor Towles’ prizewinning fiction. Even more deeply, the book has forced me to interrogate my own reactions to it." -- Robert D. Putnam, The New York Times best-selling author of Bowling Alone
"Unlike any economist’s memoir I have ever read.... Being in the thick of America’s culture wars, as a Black intellectual on the political right, has yielded a vivid bounty." -- Dwight Garner - The New York Times
"Late Admissionsis a zestfully written book, packed with humor, pathos and hard-earned wisdom." -- John McMillan - The Washington Post
"For all [Glenn Loury’s] moral defects, we find ourselves admiring him for his intellectual valor and the pugnacity of his convictions." -- Tunku Varadarajan - The Wall Street Journal
ISBN: 9781324116721
Dimensions: 211mm x 142mm x 28mm
Weight: 364g
448 pages