LOOK BACK IN ANGER.

A Personal Odyssey
Thomas Sowell
The Free Press, $25, 308 pp.

An American Story
Debra Dickerson
Pantheon Books, $24, 285 pp.

Among all the stories in Thomas Sowell's A Personal Odyssey, two struck me as particularly revealing.

The first occurred in 1960 when Sowell, a thirty-year-old candidate for a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago, was attending the annual meetings of the American Economic Association in Saint Louis in search of a job. "This was still the era of racial segregation in the South," writes Sowell, an African American, and Saint Louis was "a border state city with Southern practices."

Things went fine for him at the convention hotel, where the association had negotiated a nondiscrimination agreement. But one day while walking elsewhere in the city, he went into a restaurant where segregation prevailed. "The manager came over to the table to say politely and quietly that I could not be served there. I simply got up and left."

Contrast Sowell's reaction in that instance with his reaction in a second episode five years later in the New York City subway. He is sketchy about exactly what happened, and particularly about whether there was any racial component to it apart from the fact that a man who happened to be white stepped on his toes and refused to apologize.

Sowell quotes himself writing to a friend about the incident: "Fortunately, there was nothing bad about him but his intentions. However, I still suffered a swollen hand, a slightly sore shoulder the next day and blood spattered on my clothes." The antagonist's blood, he took pains to add afterwards.

I found these episodes interesting in light of Sowell's prominence over the last three decades as a "black conservative" commentator on--and critic of--traditional civil-rights leaders and their strategy of confronting entrenched white power.

Faced with a power structure and a political system that enforces racial inequality, as he was in Saint Louis, Sowell seems never to have been able to find a reason to challenge it--or to justify other black people in challenging it. Indeed, as late as 1962 he privately--and now publicly--expressed misgivings about the effort to desegregate public accommodations in the South, suggesting remarkably that "the blind preoccupation with this one thing seems almost pathological."

But let some hapless white guy mess up the shine on his shoes in the subway--in an incident that, for all anyone knows, may have been motivated by plain old New York boorishness rather than racial animus--and Sowell goes ballistic. Indeed, his willingness to resort to fisticuffs seems to have become for him a strange kind of proof of his bona fides as a black man. For example, writing of his youth, he notes at one point that "I do not recall ever losing a fight to a white kid my own size at J.H.S. 43." Later, in a reflection on the whole course of his life, he observes that "I grew up with no fear of whites, either physically or intellectually.... Many blacks during the 1960s (and later) were inordinately impressed with strident loudmouths whose chief claim to fame was that they 'stood up to the white man.' As someone who first decked a white guy at age twelve, and who last did it at age thirty-five, I was never really impressed by such credentials..." But if it doesn't mean anything, why mention it?

Context is everything in a memoir or autobiography. In most cases, an individual's life story is of interest to a general audience mainly because of what it tells of how the person dealt with, overcame, succumbed to, or accommodated external circumstances. Rare is the person whose story is so intrinsically compelling that the times, the places, the political and social circumstances of his or her life are unimportant or incidental.

Sowell obviously considers himself one of these rare ones. It is no accident that this book is named A Personal Odyssey. It is short on context and long on details about the main characters: "me," "myself," and "I." And if you don't like that, well, I suspect Mr. Sowell would be happy to step outside with you and settle the matter on the street.

He is probably most widely known as a black conservative newspaper columnist. Less well known is that he is a scholar, an economist who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the author of almost a dozen volumes on race, economics, and other weighty topics.

The stories in this volume he calls simply "vignettes." "Unlike some memoirs which 'tell all' (or perhaps more than all)," he writes, "these reminiscences are as selective as memory and as prudent as required by a concern for other people's feelings."

Selectivity of memory is one of the problems with the book. Time and again, from his earliest years to his most recent, Sowell presents himself as getting the best in arguments with foolish, less-intelligent antagonists. And invariably, his winning remark is too perfect; it has too much the ring of the quip we all wish later on we had been able to think of at the moment of confrontation.

No question that Sowell is a smart man--and that he apparently has the IQ scores to prove it. But even smart folks don't bat 1,000.

In going back over Debra Dickerson's An American Story in preparation for writing this review, I was surprised to realize that only about a third of it is about her family life and her growing up. I had supposed it was much more than that, because that is the most memorable part of the book.

On the other hand, that may also explain why the rest of An American Story--about Debra's decision to enlist in the Air Force, her "finding herself" in the military environment, her career and personal growth, her higher education--seemed, frankly, tedious. This despite Dickerson's awesome talent as a writer, so wonderfully graceful and colorful.

She went all too abruptly from relating the fascinating story of an American family of the great black migration, to relating a story of her navel-gazing efforts, to finding her place in the great American scheme of things. There are, nevertheless, enough saving graces to make this entire volume well worth any reader's investment of time and effort.

Dickerson's is an "up from" book, part of a tradition of black autobiographical storytelling that extends at least as far back as Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery. Her context is the Great Migration, that vast mid-twentieth-century flight of some 5 million black Americans from Southern apartheid to relative freedom and prosperity in the North. In a statement that could have been made of my family or any of thousands of others, she writes: "No one could have foretold the havoc that the inherent contradictions between the way of life my parents brought with them from the South and the way of life open to us up North would wreak on our family. I've spent my whole life trying to avail myself of what's good about one way without closing the door on the other. After forty years, I've just about got it figured out. All that's best and worst about me derives from the fact that I'm a daughter of the Great Migration."

Dickerson is at her best describing growing up in her parents' household in Saint Louis. Actually, she is at her best describing her father, Eddie Mack Dickerson, the ex-Marine who never really ceased being a Marine, the refugee from the South who "brought Jim Crow with him," the family man who ultimately drove his family to flee him. Listen to some of what she says of him:

* "He lived his life at a slow boil, always on the verge of an eruption. His anger at life's unfairness (a.k.a. 'the white man') was a seething socket deep within him that he plugged into for energy and drive."

* "Though both my parents, like millions of black Americans, made a conscious choice to thumb their noses at Jim Crow by migrating, in the end only Mama was able to leave her anger at the Mason-Dixon Line. Daddy brought Jim Crow with him. He smuggled it in, a stowaway in his heart, an overstuffed duffel bag about to burst at the seams."

* "When we bent Daddy's rules, we did so with all the stealth of escaping slaves following the North Star."

It becomes evident after a time that the central figure of this book is, arguably, not Debra Dickerson but Eddie Dickerson. Or, rather, Debra's unresolved anger at, love for, need to please--or at least understand--her father.

That resolution begins to take place after his death and through the unlikely agency of Debra's brother, Bobby. Bobby has lived what to his big sister looks like a pampered life. The result has been to turn him into a spoiled, helpless creature, living on the street because he lacks the discipline to pull himself together and achieve, as Debra has managed to do.

When Bobby is at his lowest, Debra, flush with her success as an Air Force officer, invites him to come and live for a time with her. She learns for the first time who her little brother really is, what he has endured, and why he has become the person he is. In the process, she begins to develop some of the same insights into her father.

The most fundamental of those insights may be that to be a black man in American society is to be "always on the verge of an eruption." And that would appear to be true of Thomas Sowell no less than of Eddie Dickerson. Strange that two men who couldn't be less alike politically and in socioeconomic status should have wrestled with the same dilemma.

Actually, it's not strange at all. Just part of the American dilemma, which is the ultimate American story.

Don Wycliff is public editor of the Chicago Tribune.