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.
*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.
*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.
*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
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*Daily Telegraph*
Home in the World is the chronicle of an early life well lived and
well considered.
*Literary Review*
Amartya Sen's memoir Home in the World beautifully conveys the
immense, curious charm of his unapologetic high intelligence.
*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
*Christian Science Monitor*
A charming, lively account of Sen's remarkable adolescence
*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.
*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.
*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
*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
*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
*Financial Times*
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