Accessible, well-written approach to both Galbraith’s life and the larger issues to which he has so effectively devoted his...
A fittingly oversized life of the eminent economist, philosopher, writer, and diplomat.
John Kenneth Galbraith, now 96, has long been famed for his patrician bearing and PBS-friendly intellectual prowess. Yet, Parker (Kennedy School of Government/Harvard Univ.) writes, Galbraith grew up on an Ontario farm far from any cultural centers and had barely heard of most of the great economic philosophers until arriving at graduate school; thanks to his agricultural background, Galbraith may have been the only New Deal “alphabet agency” appointee capable of keeping up with the sometime farmer John Maynard Keynes on the best way to raise hogs. Yet his domain soon extended well beyond rural policy; as an advisor, informal or formal, to every Democratic president since FDR, Galbraith has been instrumental in shaping much domestic and foreign policy. He also served as JFK’s ambassador to India and, Parker suggests, was in line to become ambassador to the Soviet Union when Kennedy was assassinated, after which he had a most celebrated falling out with Lyndon Johnson and emerged as one of the intellectual left’s most powerful critics of the war in Vietnam. Though scorned by many more number-oriented economists—MIT’s Paul Samuelson once dismissed him as “America’s foremost economist for non-economists”—Galbraith has cast a giant shadow on just about every corner of American public life; he has also been catholic in his criticism, decrying the policies of Bill Clinton as well as those of Richard Nixon and now George W. Bush. Parker ably explores the development of Galbraith’s thought, illuminating some fascinating questions as he does: Why, for instance, did business people once cry foul at government intervention but welcome “a business cycle moderated by ‘business Keynesianism’ ”? How did guns come to coexist with butter, and butter with guns? Whatever happened to the notion of countervailing power, a term that Galbraith so nicely coined—as he did “the affluent society,” “the conventional wisdom,” and other useful handles?
Accessible, well-written approach to both Galbraith’s life and the larger issues to which he has so effectively devoted his thought: an exemplary intellectual biography.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-28168-8
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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