Starred Review for Kirkus Reviews (Wed Nov 30 00:00:00 CST 2022)

The Nobel Prize winner fashions a moving, heartfelt memoir of his early life before and after Partition in Bengali India.Always reflective and erudite, Sen (b. 1933), a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard, reminisces on his academic and personal influences, creating an engaging portrait of a significant intellectual life. The son of urban Bengalis-his father was an academic who taught at Dhaka University, in what is now Bangladesh, and his mother was a modern dancer-the author traces his early upbringing studying Sanskrit with his father and grandfather, much influenced by the visionary, poet, and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. Sen was sent to Tagore's school in Shantiniketan, now in West Bengal, India, where he lived with his grandparents (after Partition in 1947, his family would be displaced there) and embarked on a kind of alternative, literary education without exams or corporeal punishment. Sen would incorporate in his later economic training the enormous tragedy of the Bengal famine of 1943, which he witnessed firsthand. "Starvation," he writes, "is a characteristic of people not being able to buyenough food in the market-not of there being not enough food in the market." Sen went on to study in Calcutta before moving to Trinity College, Cambridge, and then further advanced studies and research in the U.S. The author smoothly interweaves the rich history of the Bengali culture into his autobiography, often returning to discussions of British influence: "Two hundred years is a long time. What did the British achieve in India, and what did they fail to accomplish?" Sen also provides deeply personal, often moving reflections on the course of his academic work in welfare economics, a subject that was initially dismissed as irrelevant at Cambridge-but that would eventually win him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998.Illuminating and wonderfully accessible as both an intimate coming-of-age tale and a crash course in economics.

Kirkus Reviews (Fri Oct 04 00:00:00 CDT 2024)

The Nobel Prize winner fashions a moving, heartfelt memoir of his early life before and after Partition in Bengali India.Always reflective and erudite, Sen (b. 1933), a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard, reminisces on his academic and personal influences, creating an engaging portrait of a significant intellectual life. The son of urban Bengalis-his father was an academic who taught at Dhaka University, in what is now Bangladesh, and his mother was a modern dancer-the author traces his early upbringing studying Sanskrit with his father and grandfather, much influenced by the visionary, poet, and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. Sen was sent to Tagore's school in Shantiniketan, now in West Bengal, India, where he lived with his grandparents (after Partition in 1947, his family would be displaced there) and embarked on a kind of alternative, literary education without exams or corporeal punishment. Sen would incorporate in his later economic training the enormous tragedy of the Bengal famine of 1943, which he witnessed firsthand. "Starvation," he writes, "is a characteristic of people not being able to buyenough food in the market-not of there being not enough food in the market." Sen went on to study in Calcutta before moving to Trinity College, Cambridge, and then further advanced studies and research in the U.S. The author smoothly interweaves the rich history of the Bengali culture into his autobiography, often returning to discussions of British influence: "Two hundred years is a long time. What did the British achieve in India, and what did they fail to accomplish?" Sen also provides deeply personal, often moving reflections on the course of his academic work in welfare economics, a subject that was initially dismissed as irrelevant at Cambridge-but that would eventually win him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998.Illuminating and wonderfully accessible as both an intimate coming-of-age tale and a crash course in economics.

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

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. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Jan.)