Life in our times: memoirs C.2

Many have been close to great events and great leaders. Few have combined that proximity with the ability to write effectively, amusingly, even brilliantly about those events and people about the great moments and the low moments, the great men and women and those who were only interesting, entertaining or absurd. John Kenneth Galbraith combines proximity with ability, as all who read this book will discover.

In the urgent years of the Great Depres sion, Professor Galbraith concerned himself with agriculture in Canada and with agricul ture and economics at Berkeley. After a year of teaching at the University of California, he served briefly in FDR's administration and then went on to Harvard. He spent the late thirties in Cambridge, England, where his life centered on the new economics of John Maynard Keynes. In the war years, he held what was arguably the most powerful civilian post in war administration: he organized and administered the system of wartime price control. At the end of the war, Galbraith served as a director of the survey that inter rogated Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer and other high Nazis and assessed the effects of the air war on the German economy. Thereafter he worked for the State Department as administrator of economic affairs in the occupied countries and served as an editor of Fortune when that magazine was enlisting the talent of some of the greatest writers of the day.
In 1948 Professor Galbraith returned to Harvard to write three of the most widely read books on economics and the postwar years-The Afluent Society. The New Industrial State and Economics and the Public Purpose. In a lively and exuberant style, the author relates all this and then goes on to discuss his two political campaigns with Adlai Stevenson. whom he served as adviser and speech writer; John F. Kennedy, for whom he cam paigned across the country; his service as ambassador in India during several tense and exciting years; and his long crusade against the war in Vietnam. Along the way. he shares the lessons he learned from these efforts and experiences. It is a life replete with lessons, and Galbraith does not hesitate to point out his own mistakes.
One wonders how the author found time to combine so much activity with the writing of his best-selling books. His accomplishments are the result, the reader will discover, of an impressive combination of energy, discipline and care. This book has received similar attention. It is reasonable to suppose that it will match, if not outdo, the author's earlier successes.