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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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