A Life in Our Times : Memoirs by John Kenneth Galbraith (1981, Hardcover)
by John Kenneth Galbraith
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Perhaps economist Galbraith--the epitome of the public intellectual--was always the amused observer, even of himself, that his memoirs would have us think. Perhaps his private life was so placid that there is nothing to tell. But the book is pinched: fascinating for all that he did perceived, consistently entertaining because he's a witty, sardonic raconteur, tantalizing because you haven't heard all those stories of famous people before. Why dither? It's History. What it isn't, tho, is a drama of growth change. By p.3, you know virtually everything you're ever going to know about him--the "inherent insecurity" of the Ontario farm-boy, the sense of intellectual superiority compulsion to demonstrate same--except his strategems for success. The life can then be divided, as he very nearly does, into slightly overlapping circles. There's academe--an unloved ag-school alma mater; brief, happy sojourns at Berkeley Cambridge; distasteful Princeton; "Harvard before democracy" --very little improved--afterwards. There's economics--Veblen; Keynes; eminent, idiosyncratic contemporaries; his reconstruction of US economic life. There's government service in DC--preeminently as WWII price czar, surmounting the "disaster" of "my" design for price stabilization. There's government service abroad--surveying the meager economic effects of strategic bombing. There's a stint on Fortune--where he learns, from H. Luce, how to measure his words. Then he returns to Harvard, sets out "to repair my ac
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
- Year: 1981
- Binding: Hardcover
- ISBN: 9780395305096
- Condition: Good
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