Reflections on the life and work of one of America’s preeminent public intellectuals on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Robert B. Reich here describes Galbraith as the “most buoyant dismal scientist of our age.” The description seems apt, for Galbraith has always brought to his intellectual endeavors wit, grace, courage, and humanity. Sasson, a governor of the London School of Economics, has gathered essays by a few of Galbraith’s friends—among them Carlos Fuentes, Derek Bok, Daniel Patrick Moynihan—exploring the style and substance of this remarkable individual. The book’s first part looks at Galbraith the person: father, friend, neighbor, mentor. The second examines his work as an economist. Yet the two parts merge; as we come to see, the person is very much in the work. As an economist, Galbraith has always questioned the “conventional wisdom” (a phrase he coined) of the discipline, has insisted that economics should have something to do with real economies, with real people and the quality of the lives they lead. Eschewing both the belief in the magic of the pure market and the panacea of rigid socialist planning, he has sought ways to make capitalism work, despite itself, while recognizing the vital role government must play to make it work. Above all, he has deplored the imbalance in our society, as Arthur Schlesinger writes, “between the opulence of private consumption and the starvation of public services.” And if there is tragedy in his legacy, it lies in the fact that the few rich no longer care, and the many less affluent no longer can afford to be concerned with the common good. Time may have passed Galbraith by, but that is to time’s detriment. The book fittingly concludes with excerpts from Galbraith’s own works, separately edited by Andrea Williams. This is a loving tribute, and today that makes for a rare and pleasurable reading experience.
Pub Date: May 6, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-97130-6
Page Count: 187
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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