Home in the world A memoir

Review by Booklist Review

Nobel Prize-winning economist Sen reminisces about his intellectual roots in India and the UK, revealing a life of intense curiosity and passionate philosophical debate. As a child in British India, Sen witnessed hardship--bombings, poverty, the Indian partition of 1947. But he also enjoyed the benefits of a relaxed, progressive academic atmosphere in which he could "roam around" in the library "with an abandon that transformed [his] life." He was fascinated by Rudyard Kipling, Sanskrit classics, and riparian geography. Later, Sen would move to Calcutta, where a friend convinced him that his dual interests in mathematics and social inequality could be combined in the study of economics. At Cambridge in the 1950s, he found intellectually sophisticated friends (including Piero Sraffa, devotee of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci) as well as sparring partners (including Keynesian economist Joan Robinson). Charting diverse influences--Gandhi to Rabindranath Tagore to Wittgenstein to Adam Smith--Sen reiterates that his intellectual proclivities have always spilled beyond narrow disciplinary confines. And if Sen's life of contrasts has been "dizzying" at times, his autobiography suggests an enduring commitment to intellectual work with social purpose.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this quietly captivating memoir, Nobel Prize--winning economist Sen (The Idea of Justice) traces the influences that fed into his groundbreaking applications of economic theory to alleviate poverty. He begins with his earliest memories as a young student in late 1930s India, recalling how his midwife grandmother's talk about "unnecessarily high death rates" informed his later work researching maternal mortality, while his mother's sympathies with Muslims who weren't allowed to own land awakened his awareness of the role of class in sectarian strife. He also reminisces on his lifelong fascination with abstract reasoning and solutions for ending "earthy practical problems" like hunger, economic deprivations, and famines. Recalling the Bengal famine of 1943--a mass starvation that Sen was eyewitness to at age 10--he notes that even in the midst of millions of impoverished Bengalis dying, "the British public was kept amazingly uninformed." Through passages animated by his piercing insights into the long history of inequality in India, Sen whisks readers from his college years in Calcutta and graduate studies at Cambridge to his later years lecturing on welfare economics around the globe. What emerges is a contemplative travelogue and a fascinating look into the singular consciousness of one of the world's foremost thinkers. This is a galvanizing reflection on a roaming life. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Jan.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Nobel Prize-winning economist Sen (Harvard Univ.; Collective Choice and Social Welfare) shares in this memoir the rich and varied professional life that has allowed him to work across the globe and interact with some of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th and 21st centuries. His memories range from his childhood under the British Raj in Dhaka, to school days in Santiniketan at the uniquely progressive school begun by Rabindranath Tagore. Just after World War II, he began his undergraduate degree at Presidency College in Calcutta. While there, he weathered a frightening bout of oral cancer which was treated by high doses of radiation. An exemplary scholar, he continued his studies in economics and philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Having witnessed a famine that killed millions of people in Bengal in 1943, he went on to spend much of his career studying how economic ideas impact the marginalized. His career has taken him not only to Cambridge, but also to Oxford, MIT, Harvard, and Stanford; along the way, he has met and conversed with many well-known academics, including the parents of Kamala Harris. VERDICT A vivid memoir, recommended for those interested in the intersection of economics and social science.--Caren Nichter, Univ. of Tennessee at Martin

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The Nobel Prize winner fashions a moving, heartfelt memoir of his early life before and after Partition in Bengali India. Always reflective and erudite, Sen (b. 1933), a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard, reminisces on his academic and personal influences, creating an engaging portrait of a significant intellectual life. The son of urban Bengalis--his father was an academic who taught at Dhaka University, in what is now Bangladesh, and his mother was a modern dancer--the author traces his early upbringing studying Sanskrit with his father and grandfather, much influenced by the visionary, poet, and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. Sen was sent to Tagore's school in Shantiniketan, now in West Bengal, India, where he lived with his grandparents (after Partition in 1947, his family would be displaced there) and embarked on a kind of alternative, literary education without exams or corporeal punishment. Sen would incorporate in his later economic training the enormous tragedy of the Bengal famine of 1943, which he witnessed firsthand. "Starvation," he writes, "is a characteristic of people not being able to buyenough food in the market--not of there being not enough food in the market." Sen went on to study in Calcutta before moving to Trinity College, Cambridge, and then further advanced studies and research in the U.S. The author smoothly interweaves the rich history of the Bengali culture into his autobiography, often returning to discussions of British influence: "Two hundred years is a long time. What did the British achieve in India, and what did they fail to accomplish?" Sen also provides deeply personal, often moving reflections on the course of his academic work in welfare economics, a subject that was initially dismissed as irrelevant at Cambridge--but that would eventually win him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998. Illuminating and wonderfully accessible as both an intimate coming-of-age tale and a crash course in economics. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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