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Home in the World 2021
Home in the World is a memoir written by Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen and published in 2021 by Allen Lane. The book serves as a partial autobiography, focusing primarily on the first three decades of Sen’s life, with most of the content concluding around 1963. That is when he returns to India after spending over a decade living abroad.
Sen recounts his early years, including time spent in Dhaka and Mandalay, and his ties to Santiniketan. The book explores the history of his family, the intellectual landscape of India, and his studies at Presidency College in Kolkata. It also describes his journey to Cambridge as a student, following his recovery from a serious case of oral cancer. His years in Cambridge and later teaching at the Delhi School of Economics are included, among other personal and academic experiences.
Almost two-thirds of the book centers on Sen’s origins, youth, and life in India before he went to Cambridge at age twenty. Rather than following a strict timeline, the memoir takes readers through interesting side paths, highlighting individuals who influenced him. These figures include his maternal grandfather Kshiti Mohan Sen, Rabindranath Tagore, Aung San Suu Kyi, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Piero Sraffa (his Cambridge mentor), Isaiah Berlin, economists Kenneth Arrow and Paul Samuelson, Mahbub ul Haq, and Maurice Dobb.
Sen avoids detailed personal narratives and remains brief about his own accomplishments. For example, while he mentions Mahbub ul Haq’s work for the United Nations in creating the Human Development Index, he does not discuss his own role in that effort. The writing style is straightforward and accessible, differing from the complexity seen in Sen’s economic and philosophical writings.
The memoir is divided into five parts and contains 26 chapters. It is dedicated to his wife Emma Rothschild.
Details
- Publisher
- Allen Lane
- ISBN
- 9781846144868
