Name-Dropping
From FDR On
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- ¥1,200
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- ¥1,200
Publisher Description
“[A] charming memoir [that] serves to remind us that idealism and trust once existed in the White House and Washington, a fact that may seem unbelievable” (Newsday).
A New York Times Notable Book
“Names? You want names? No one knows better ones than John Kenneth Galbraith,” says the San Diego Union-Tribune. Name-Dropping covers the long and remarkable career of this economist and former ambassador, charting sixty-five years of politics, government, and American history as he writes of the many people he has known—among them Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, and Jawaharlal Nehru—“with a wit, style, and elegance few can match” (Library Journal).
This “mischievously and merrily unrepentant” memoir offers a rich and uniquely personal history of the twentieth century—a history the author himself helped to shape (The Boston Globe).
“Shrewd, irreverent, penetrating, and hilarious.” —Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
“It is not usual for a man past his 90th birthday to write a book that is as fresh and lively as the work of a 30-year-old. But John Kenneth Galbraith is not a usual man, and he has done it.” —The New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Galbraiths thin, impressionistic sojourn through his astounding career provides glimpses of some of the centurys most remarkable personalitiesincluding his own. In a series of chapters devoted to powerful, compelling individuals (FDR, JFK, LBJ, Nehru, to name a few), Galbraith rehashes much that is already known about these figures while offering his own perspective on their personalities and motivations. An astute observer of personalities, Galbraith, professor emeritus of economics at Harvard, expresses admiration for Nehru, Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt and John and Jackie Kennedy, scorn for Albert Speer and aversion to LBJ for his Vietnam entanglements. Galbraith claims he was ignorant of JFKs philandering, expresses his belief that Nazi leaders he interrogated after WWII were an incredible collection of often deranged incompetents and relates the rebukes he received from FDR concerning price control and rationing decisions. Though Galbraith treads on familiar ground with his defenses of Keynesian economics and occasional forays into liberal, Affluent Society territory, the book never congeals into a coherent whole. It is, instead an anecdotal mlange of first-hand impressions, autobiography and history.
