Karen Heller | Justice Thomas looks back in anger

Clarence Thomas has sat on the Supreme Court for 16 years. He chose this week, the moment of the court's return, to publish his $1.5 million

My Grandfather's Son

, possibly the most intimate, angry and vindictive book ever written by a justice on the nation's highest court, the government's last bastion of professional reserve.

Alas, what Son has unleashed, after being kept under wraps until this weekend, is a Thomas-Hill rematch, a replay of that sordid summer of porn films and garlanded Coke cans, and hardly the nation's finest hour. He questions Anita Hill's competence and calls her many things, including "touchy," "abrasive," "ambitious" and, worst of all, a "left-winger."

He also - I am sorry to report - writes that the sooner he composed Hill's recommendation letter for another job, "the sooner she'd be out of my hair."

Unsurprisingly, Hill lashed back in print and on television yesterday at her former boss. Instead of celebrating his achievements on the court, Thomas is settling old scores, and then some. It's the acid reflux that won't quit.

Then again, he asked for it. Son doesn't include a solitary mention of his work on the Supreme Court, ending as it does with his investiture, after devoting nearly a third of the 289-page memoir to the ugly confirmation process.

Following the (Bill) Clinton School of Memoirs in thanking everyone who has ever helped him along the way, Thomas also names names and points fingers (possibly the middle) at everyone who has ever wronged him, even a guy whose name he never learned.

One of the glories of the Supreme Court, as it once was of the rest of public service, was how professionally its members have behaved, keeping their private lives under their robes. What personal passions were shared did nothing to overshadow the justices' legal reputations. William O. Douglas and Sandra Day O'Connor wrote of their love of the American wilderness. Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are known for their love of opera.

Thomas writes about contemplating suicide, his alcoholism, his failed first marriage, his bad hair days, his "talking" about porn movies at Yale.

It's Too Much Information, more than we need to know, though it was curious to learn that Thomas' mentor, Sen. John C. Danforth, played a tape of "Onward, Christian Soldiers" to Thomas and his wife in a Senate bathroom before the confirmation hearings.

Thomas' reasoning is often specious. He writes of emulating black scholars to whom "politics meant nothing," only to comment three pages later about how his decision to vote for Ronald Reagan "was a giant step for a black man." Politics had everything to do with his nomination to the Supreme Court.

He loathes Yale, though he knows his law degree helped give him - and also Hill - an important boost in the legal world. He wishes race weren't the issue, but identifies everyone by it. While wishing for more tolerance, he categorically detests white liberals, dissing senators and former associates, exhibiting as little tolerance toward them as some white people did for him growing up.

"By then I'd shed the last of my illusions about white liberals: I knew that their broad-mindedness stopped well short of tolerating blacks who disagreed with them," he writes in one of several attacks.

Fortunately for him, there are so few left on the Supreme Court.

To this white liberal, it's not as troubling to have a black conservative sitting on the court as a justice who is so unequivocally angry, irrational, and wide-sweeping in his contempt.

What's most shocking about Son is its lack of any discussion about the law. Most substantive issues in Thomas' legal and judicial careers, as well as his intellectual development, are curiously absent. Yes, it's something to rise from nothing, from a troubled family history, to the highest court in the land. To a man born in poverty with a history of financial debt (he was still paying back school loans when he reached the Supreme Court), HarperCollins' $1.5 million payout must have been irresistible.

But this is some price to pay, turning back the clock 16 years and trudging, once again, through the mire of scandal and revenge.