Sowell is a highly respected economist and columnist. He is one of a few prominent black conservatives in academia. This is one of his best works, drawing on a lifetime of study and experience.
He is trying to get across a few major observations about the connections of geographical and demographic situations of different nations with their corresponding wealth and political environments. Some of the narration is repetitious because of the overlap in subject matter, but the book is heavy on facts and evidence, from which he makes his conclusions. Significantly, these are very different from many of the conventional opinions of contemporary scholars and politicians.
Many reviews and much discussion is available on-line.

Notes (only a very few; I scribbled on every page, including the copious footnotes):
p. 402: "virtue signaling" is well described by T.S. Elliot, although he did not use that phrase:
"Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves." (in "The Cocktail Party"; per ch.15 fn 33)

p. 409: "You're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

p. 424-5: (conclusion for the core of his investigation)
"It is by no means obvious why we should prefer trying to equalize incomes to putting our efforts into increasing output. People in general, and the poor in particular, seem to 'vote with their feet' by moving to where there is greater prosperity, rather than where there is greater economic equality. Rising standards of living, especially for those at the bottom economically, have resulted not so much from changing the relative sizes of different slices of the economic pie as from increasing the size of the pie itself - which has largely been accomplished without requiring heady rhetoric, fierce emotions or bloodshed."

"Does it not matter if the hungry are fed, if slums are replaced by decent and air-conditioned housing, if infant mortality rates are reduced to less than a tenth of what they were before? Are invidious "gaps" and "disparities" all that matter? In a world where we are all beneficiaries of enormous windfall gains that our forebears never had, are we to tear apart the society that created all this, because some people's windfall gains are greater or less than some other people's windfall gains?" ( )

He believes that slavery was not so bad for African-Americans beacouse they are wealthier than the Africans today.

The book is full of childish thinking. ( )

Author tells it like it is. ( )

Someone on Amazon called Sowell "Hammer of the Ignorant." That's perfect.

Here's how good this book is: I listened to it and also read parts of it of it on a copy I borrowed from the library--and as soon as I finished, I ordered the new, second and expanded edition, on Amazon so I could read it again. (I almost never, ever buy books brand new.) This treats themes that Sowell has been exploring for years, but the real focus of this one is that the world is not a level playing field, geographically or in any other way--and that we don't do anything to provoke progress by lying to ourselves about human history. At one point, Sowell offhandedly states, "If you want to help someone, tell him the truth; if you want to help yourself, tell him what he wants to hear." That's the core idea of the book. Highly recommended. ( )