Nine hours of one-on-one interviews with a sitting Supreme Court justice is the kind of access most biographers only dream about. Senator Ted Cruz got it, and “Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas” is what he did with it.
The book traces Justice Clarence Thomas’s life from a childhood of poverty and segregation in coastal Georgia through a brief, little-discussed flirtation with radical left politics in his twenties, and finally into more than three decades on the nation’s highest court. Cruz, a former Thomas clerk turned senator, uses that personal history to build an argument about character: that Thomas’s willingness to write lone dissents, overturn precedent he views as wrongly decided, and ignore elite disapproval traces directly back to lessons learned from his grandfather and from the hardship of his early years.
The interview access is the book’s clear centerpiece, and Cruz uses it well, letting Thomas’s own voice carry long stretches of the narrative rather than paraphrasing it into the background. The early chapters covering Pin Point, Georgia, and Thomas’s Catholic seminary years are the strongest in the book, rendered with a specificity that suggests genuine time spent listening rather than working from clip files. Cruz also doesn’t shy away from the more radical chapter of Thomas’s youth, using it to sharpen rather than soften the portrait of a man who has changed his mind in public, at real cost.
Reception has tracked closely with readers’ existing views of Thomas and, to some extent, of Cruz himself. Sympathetic outlets have praised the book as an authoritative, overdue account of a justice whose personal story is less familiar to the public than his jurisprudence, and have noted its debt to — and expansion beyond — Thomas’s own 2007 memoir. More skeptical reviewers have questioned whether a former clerk and political ally can offer the kind of critical distance a definitive biography requires, and have pointed out that the book spends more energy explaining Thomas’s positions sympathetically than interrogating them. Almost everyone agrees the biographical material is the book’s strongest asset.
“Going Further” is less a work of dispassionate biography than a case for the defense, made by someone with real access and real conviction. Readers already inclined to admire Thomas will find plenty to confirm that view; those looking for a more adversarial accounting of his judicial legacy should look elsewhere. As a character study of endurance and self-reliance, though, it’s hard to put down.
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