Description: From Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, a memoir about home, belonging, inequality, and identity, recounting a singular life devoted to bettering humanity.
Brief description: Amartya Sen is a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University. A former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, he won the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 1998 and the National Humanities Medal in 2011. His many celebrated books include Development as Freedom and The Idea of Justice.
Review Quotes: Stirred in with Mr. Sen's memories, which are bright in their detail and freshness, are meditations of various sorts: on the balance-sheet of British rule in India; on the importance of classical languages in a young person's education; on the philosophical disagreements (of which there were many) between Mahatma Gandhi and the poet Rabindranath Tagore (like Mr. Sen, a Nobel laureate and Bengali); on the ghastly Bengal famine of 1943, which killed three million people; and on the differences between Britain and the U.S. in their respective approaches to an understanding of economics. . . . The most compelling chapters of Mr. Sen's memoirs are... those that dwell lovingly--even languorously--on his childhood and schooling. . . . [Sen] is an unflinching man of science but also insistently humane. His many ardent admirers regard him as an economist for the downtrodden. How he arrived at his status of global progressive icon would make a compelling storyline for his next memoir.--Tunku Varadarajan "Wall Street Journal"