Home in the World: A Memoir

Description

The extraordinary early life in India and England of one of the world's leading public intellectuals Where is 'home'? For Amartya Sen, home has been many places - Dhaka in modern Bangladesh, the little university town of Santiniketan, where he was raised as much by his grandparents as by his parents, Calcutta where he first studied economics and was active in student movements, and Trinity College, Cambridge, to which he came aged 19. Home in the World shows how Sen's experience shaped his ideas - about economics, philosophy, identity, community, famines, gender inequality, social choice and the power of discussion in public life. The joys of learning and the importance of friendship are powerfully conveyed. He invokes some of the great thinkers of the past and his own time - from Ashoka in the third century BC and Akbar in the sixteenth, to David Hume, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Maurice Dobb, Kenneth Arrow and Eric Hobsbawm. Above all, Sen emphasises the importance of enlarging our views as much as we can, of human sympathy and understanding across time and distance, and of being at home in the world.

Amartya Sen is Professor of Economics and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1998 to 2004, and won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998. His many celebrated books including Development as Freedom (1999), The Argumentative Indian (2005), Identity and Violence- The Illusion of Destiny (2007), and The Idea of Justice (2010), have been translated into more than 40 languages. In 2012 he received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama and in 2020 he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade by President Steinmeier.

Sen is so engaging, so full of charm and has such a clear gift for the graceful sentence. It's a wonderful book, the portrait of a citizen of the world ... full of its author's beguiling personality, elegance and wit of presentation, and joyous in its celebration of the life of the mind. -- Philip Hensher * Spectator * Sen's sensibility still seems Tagorean. There is the same affinity for freedom and imagination, a similar commitment to the vulnerable and the downtrodden, but most of all a shared sense that we don't yet know all there is to know about the world. -- Abhrajyoti Chakraborty * Guardian * The clarity of Sen's thought and the lucidity of his prose are delightful and entertaining but the lightness of his touch can often be deceptive because it sometimes conceals the depth and range of Sen's erudition, the intensity and the passion of his commitment to certain values and ideas and his relentless quest to bring together the home and the world. -- Rudrangshu Mukherjee * The Wire India * a charming, immensely readable, and very enjoyable voyage through the making of a great mind ... we are just led with rare good humour and gentle wit through the formative years of his life ... This is a very accessible book, "fun" to use one of Sen's favourite words, written in beautifully constructed short sentences that explain the most profound observations with commendable brevity ... It is Sen's capacity to maintain a simple style while telling amusing stories or explaining complex issues (as he does occasionally) that is both unique and captivating ... This memoir is an unforgettable story of the evolution of a thinking and enquiring and all too human a mind, as also a tribute to one who has harnessed his abundant academic talent to the needs of the humblest and poorest -- Mani Shankar Aiyar * Open the Magazine * Amartya Sen's Home in the World is really three books in one. A sensitively written memoir of the first thirty years of his life, it is interspersed with sharp commentaries on history and politics as well as intellectual disquisitions on economic theory and philosophy. -- Sugata Bose * Harvard Magazine * hypnotic ... Amartya Sen's exemplary life is a lesson in engagement with the world in which he is so at home; he is a real advertisement for someone who is happy being "a citizen of nowhere", or everywhere. -- Ferdinand Mount * Prospect * it strikes me that Sen is more than an economist, a moral philosopher or even an academic. He is a life-long campaigner, through scholarship and activism, via friendships and the occasional enemy, for a more noble idea of home - and therefore of the world. -- Edward Luce * Financial Times * This charming and absorbing book ... has the flavour of a relaxed conversation with a gifted raconteur ... Sen's memoir traces the experiences, encounters, and relationships that determined his conceptual concerns and intellectual evolution. It is also a deeply humane appreciation of what life can offer, filled with respect and empathy for other humans. -- Jayati Ghosh * The Lancet * captivating ... This is not, though, just a book of ideas. Home in the World can't help but be the work of an intellectual. But, as its title implies, it is the work of an intellectual who acknowledges that ideas grow out of - are imbricated with - phenomena external to the self. -- Christopher Bray * Tablet * [full of] raconteurial energy ... Sen writes with an elegance and wit ... His accounts of his own work are characteristically succinct and fluent ... His evocation of post-war Cambridge and the towering figures of 20th-century economics are affectionate but just. Even more vivid is the picture of his undergraduate days in Calcutta, with its student revolutionaries and generous booksellers. ... It is striking just how much of Sen's own large-hearted liberalism turn out to have been prefigured in the freedoms of his unusual childhood. -- Nikhil Krishnan * Daily Telegraph * Home in the World is the chronicle of an early life well lived and well considered. -- David Gilmour * Literary Review * Amartya Sen's memoir Home in the World beautifully conveys the immense, curious charm of his unapologetic high intelligence. -- Philip Hensher * Spectator Books of the Year * graceful and hopeful ... Home in the World focuses on Sen's formative years, revealing the roots of his academic interests in his early experiences ... Sen is such a charming and engaging narrator -- Barbara Spindel * Christian Science Monitor * A charming, lively account of Sen's remarkable adolescence -- Zareer Masani * History Today * Sen's gentle memoir shed[s] light on the distant nooks of a long life of distinction. ... There is something of Tagore in the judicious Mr. Sen. He is an un?inching man of science but also insistently humane. -- Tunku Varadarajan * Wall Street Journal * warmhearted, clear-eyed account of the formative years of his life, a book that reaches from Myanmar to Berkeley ... a testament to just how far, in one life, one man might go into that vast world ... Sen's writing style is even-keeled and gently humorous. -- Mythili G. Rao * Washington Post * PRAISE FOR AMARTYA SEN * - * With his masterly prose, ease of erudition and ironic humour, Sen is one of the few great world intellectuals on whom we may rely to make sense out of our existential confusion -- Nadine Gordimer Amartya Sen is one of the most distinguished minds of our time [who] enjoyably mixes moments of profundity with flashes of mischievous provocation -- William Dalrymple * New York Review of Books * The world's poor and dispossessed could have no more articulate or insightful a champion -- Kofi Annan An accessible and exceptional humanitarian -- Jon Snow * New Statesman * Sen is one of the great minds of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We owe him a huge debt -- Nicholas Stern A distinguished inheritor of the tradition of public philosophy and reasoning - Roy, Tagore, Gandhi, Nehru ... if ever there was a global intellectual, it is Sen -- Sunil Khilnani * Financial Times *