‘Goddammit,” the economist and intellectual Glenn Loury vented in a live YouTube broadcast in February, “don’t dishonor my amazing achievements by chalking it up to [racial] favoritism. I resent it; I don’t like it; I don’t need it; I don’t want it. That’s not a political position. . . . You’re going to call me a sellout because I’m defending my dignity? F*** you!”

Loury, who is African American but has never wanted his race to define him, has, especially in recent years, chafed at the racial essentialism that has gripped much of the progressive world. As he documents in Late Admissions, his bracing, impassioned, and at times startlingly candid memoir, his outlook has over the years veered from right to left and right again, defying the prevailing conventions across the spectrum. And as his YouTube outburst demonstrated, at the twilight of his remarkable career, Loury’s uniquely combustible mix of academic, ideological, and personal characteristics defies any attempt at stereotyping.

Late Admissions begins by describing young Glenn’s hardscrabble upbringing on Chicago’s gritty South Side, where he falls into the alluring traps that have ensnared many inner-city kids over the years — and he spares no details. These mortifying confessions set the tone for the rest of the book. “The more self-discrediting information I deploy,” Loury writes in his introduction, “the more credible I will become.” The memoir skillfully intertwines three distinct threads: the author’s impressive academic rise, his ideological evolution, and his troubled personal life, which at various times threatens to torpedo his achievements.

Loury and his sister grow up in an apartment above his aunt’s kitchen, raised mostly by his mother but with help from his father. (His parents’ marriage had ended in divorce.) His father, he writes, possesses “a rigid sense of virtue and self-respect.” Teenaged Glenn thrives academically in high school but first encounters trouble when he steals a car to ferry his sweetheart to prom. His forgiving father bails him out and stakes him with $1,000 to attend the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he initially succeeds before “things quickly go to pieces.” He whiles away his time and money drinking, smoking weed, and gambling in pool halls, and he soon impregnates his girlfriend, Charlene Teague. “Do the right thing,” his father admonishes him in a somewhat counterintuitive way. “Be a father to your child. But do not marry that girl.”

Loury complies, along the way quitting school and starting a job as a timekeeper at a typesetting company. But when Charlene again gets pregnant, Loury finally pops the question. (Shortly after they wed, but unrestrained by marital vows, Loury impregnates a mistress, unbeknownst to his family.) Soon, he enrolls at community college and wins admission to Northwestern University, where he begins studying — and excelling at — economics. “The feelings of power and mastery I experienced while dominating an opponent on the pool table,” he writes, “were nothing compared to what came over me at the blackboard. . . . It was an intoxicating sensation.”

Academically, Loury soars. He is admitted to MIT’s graduate program in economics, where he rubs shoulders with legends such as Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, and Peter Diamond. He receives his first postdoctoral position back at Northwestern, then goes to the University of Michigan, where he publishes a landmark paper — “Intergenerational Transfers and the Distribution of Earnings” — in 1981. Harvard hires him away, making him the university’s first black tenured professor of economics.

Following a tumultuous decade in Cambridge, he decamps across the Charles River to Boston University, where he publishes yet-more-noteworthy articles documenting how affirmative action inflicts economic harm on those it purports to help. In 2005, he moves to Brown University, where he focuses on the economics of incarceration; looking back, he writes that “there was no blacker project than criticizing America’s prisons.”

Ideologically, Loury embarks on his career sympathetic to Marxism (he recalls being “deeply affected by the ambition of Marx’s critique, how seriously he took the workers’ part in the creation of value, and how rigorously he pursued that relation between labor and value”), but, as the Reagan Revolution gets going, he comes under the sway of laissez-faire conservatism and begins to recognize that African Americans need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. For diagnosing “a social pathology in the so-called black underclass,” he catches flak from erstwhile allies in the NAACP. (He describes a particularly poignant moment in which he made Coretta Scott King cry.)

But he becomes a pundit sensation after, in 1984, the New Republic publishes his article “A New American Dilemma,” which becomes a launching point for a writing career in neoconservative outlets such as Commentary and the Public Interest. He affiliates with the American Enterprise Institute. His writing catches the attention of New York Republican congressman Jack Kemp, who catapults him to a meeting in the White House with the president, Vice President Bush, Ed Meese, and other center-right luminaries. Secretary of Education Bill Bennett offers him a senior position in the department.

However, Loury joins the furious backlash against the 1994 publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve, over its consideration of the relationship between race and IQ. (Loury would later come to regret his response.) He also dissents from the widespread praise lavished by conservatives upon a young Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism and falls out with Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom when they publish their controversial America in Black and White, which he ravages in a 5,000-word Atlantic review. Loury clashes with the Commentary–AEI–Public Interest crowd, lambastes James Q. Wilson’s “broken windows” theory in, of all places, an obituary of Wilson, and adopts an openly progressive outlook — for which the black activists who had shunned Loury welcome him “home.”

Personally, Loury’s life becomes a shambles. He and Charlene divorce after his arrival at MIT, where he meets and marries Linda Datcher, herself an economist. But his inveterate womanizing continues: In addition to indulging in numerous one-night stands, some with prostitutes, Loury has an affair with his best friend’s wife. He also takes up with a young mentee, whom he parades around at various academic conferences and for whom he secures a “love nest” in Boston’s South End, where they frequently quarrel. A domestic-violence arrest reaches the Boston papers, sinks his Department of Education nomination, and nearly scuttles his academic career.

Drugs also confound him. What begins with marijuana-smoking becomes experimentation with cocaine and then a full-blown crack addiction. “I am of course aware of the horrible toll that crack and freebase cocaine are exacting from black urban neighborhoods,” he recalls, “including the one where I’m currently holed up.” Even after he’s arrested for possession and his Harvard lawyers secure a treatment-based alternative to jail time, he continues using. After finally hitting rock bottom in a Burger King parking lot, he enrolls in rehab.

However improbably, he manages to turn things around. Despite the occasional relapse, he overcomes his addiction. After years of trying, Linda finally becomes pregnant with Glenn Jr., whose blessed arrival facilitates their reconciliation. Glenn Sr. also finds God: “I came to believe that Jesus Christ died for my sins.” He reconnects with Alden — his mistress’s son — and finds out he’s a grandfather.

And here the threads again intertwine. In the late 2000s, tragedy strikes when the saintly Linda develops terminal cancer. In the run-up to and aftermath of her passing, Loury contemplates his personal shortcomings and reevaluates his ideological choices. And as the racial reckoning of the 2010s unfolds — Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, the Obama presidency, Black Lives Matter — Loury returns to his earlier iconoclasm. “To cling to the very prejudice that we were always meant to transcend,” he writes, “to make it the sine qua non of black selfhood, was a horrific error.”

He thus finds himself once again on the outs with the activist crowd while earning a “strange new respect” from conservatives. His bimonthly podcasts with the similarly heterodox black linguist John McWhorter (whence the eruption with which we began) have become appointment listening. And he finds love again, marrying LaJuan, his current wife.

Throughout the book, Loury’s candor derives from a brutal, instinctive need to reveal the truth, leavened by strategic forethought. “I must tell it all in this memoir,” he writes, “because if I don’t tell it all, nothing I say will be heard.” Readers looking for a detailed treatment of his economic theory and racial polemics will be disappointed; for that, his (widely available) oeuvre will have to suffice. Instead, Late Admissions offers a thoughtful reflection on an extraordinary life marked by dramatic peaks and jaw-dropping valleys, shocking vice and heartwarming virtue, ideological U-turns, and relationships nurtured and destroyed. A life in full indeed.