There was a certain topic Loury had mentioned on the first day that I was always too timid to ask him about: that he’d led something of a checkered life, with multiple run-ins with the law, and, in the ’80s, had wrecked what seemed like promising prospects in Washington. And so it’s gratifying that in his new memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, my old professor brings that relentlessness, so familiar from his classroom, to scrutinizing his life, his times, and himself.

Numerous episodes in Loury’s extraordinarily candid new volume remind me of little so much as country icon Merle Haggard’s multiple picaresque memoirs but beginning on the South Side of Chicago instead of in Bakersfield. They describe an irrepressible genius from humble circumstances with more smarts than he knew what to do with, who keeps flying too close to the sun and getting into frequently hilarious trouble. Again and again, I found myself cackling or shouting at the page: C’mon Glenn, don’t steal that car! Don’t get her pregnant! Don’t rent that mistress a penthouse! Don’t smoke that crack! Yet it’s hard not to conclude that Loury’s countless misadventures pursuing his baser impulses haven’t been some part of the secret sauce making him so insightful as a scholar. Most MIT Ph.D.s, not to mention Ivy League faculty, have seen but a shred of the realities he’s lived.