Home in the World
A Memoir
-
- $21.99
Publisher Description
From Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, a memoir about home, belonging, inequality, and identity, recounting a singular life devoted to bettering humanity.
A towering figure in the field of economics, Amartya Sen is perhaps best known for his work on poverty and famine, as inspired by events in his boyhood home of West Bengal, India. But Sen has, in fact, called many places “home,” from Dhaka in modern Bangladesh to Trinity College, Cambridge. In Home in the World, these “homes” collectively form an unparalleled and profoundly truthful vision of twentieth- and twenty-first century life. Interweaving scenes from his youth with candid reflections on wealth, welfare, and social justice, Sen shows how his life experiences—in Asia, Europe, and later America—vitally informed his work, culminating in the ultimate “portrait of a citizen of the world” (Philip Hensher, Spectator).
• “Sen is more than an economist, moral philosopher or even an academic. He is a life-long campaigner . . . for a more noble idea of home.” —Edward Luce, Financial Times (UK)
• “[Sen] is an unflinching man of science but also insistently humane.” —Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
