That is the new Amartya Sen autobiography, and it is well…a biography. You learn that he loves Sichuan duck and “hilsha fish” (if done properly with the mustard), his thoughts of enduring military service, Sen’s study of Sanskrit, his self-description as a hypochondriac, his bout with mouth cancer at a young age, and that Calcutta (!) is a great walking city, at least when Sen lived there in the 1950s, among other matters. The readers definitely gets his or her “biography money’s worth.
”But should you care?
The name “Tagore” appears so many times in the text that it takes up 3/4 of a page in the index. This is very much a Bengali memoir.
I learned that Sen’s family lived for a few years with him in Burma, he is sympathetic to Buddhism, he was ten at the time of the Great Famine and it had a major impact on his thinking, and that Sen was greatly influenced by Maurice Dobb and thought Marx was unjustly excluded from the economics curriculum. Piero Sraffa was his Director of Studies at Cambridge, and introduced Sen to the wonders of ristretto. Sen also stresses the import of Sraffa for converting the early Wittgenstein into the later Wittgenstein. He has great praise for P.T. Bauer, both as a thinker and as an instructor. He describes Buchanan as a “…very agreeable but rather conservative economist” who got him thinking about whether the notion of collective preference made sense at all.
This doesn’t have enough coherence to be a great book, but there is enough in here of interest to satisfy anyone curious about Sen.
You can pre-order here, I got my copy from the UK.
