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A Life in Our Times By John Kenneth Galbraith Houghton Mifflin, 563 pp., $16.95 When George Orwell argued that every career looks like failure if viewed from the inside, he obviously had not envisioned John Kenneth Galbraith in the act of autobiographical assessment. In A Life in Our Times the erstwhile Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard not only exudes approval of himself from one end of the tale to the other, but also does not hesitate to include among the anecdotal illustrations of what a superior person he is a considerable number of stories that he had previously brought to our attention at least once if not several times in such earlier excursions into self-congratulation as Annals of an Abiding liberal. Ambassador’s Journal, Journey to Poland and Yugoslavia, The Scotch, and Economics, Peace, and Laughter. His invincible egotism has further prompted the memoirist to make space for lengthy quotations from The Affluent Society and other products of his pen, and to share with us the details of how many copies of his books have been sold, the number of translations they have achieved, the amount of money they have earned, and what admiring book reviewers have said about them.

Galbraith’s life story is also much given over to listings of his prominent friends, listings which are often unrelieved by any sort of characterization of the people in question, but which never fail to refer to their once or future fame. For the author’s desire to tell us what his friends are really like is not nearly as intense as his simple wish to let us know that his acquaintanceship is very wide. Hence he constantly confronts us with sentences that even a newspaper gossip columnist might find uninteresting: “In Stockholm I made the acquaintance of Bertil Ohlin, a later Nobel Prize winner and for long the leader of the Liberal Party; of the young Dag Hammarskjöld, then Undersecretary for Finance; of Karin Kock, later a government minister; and of Professor Gösta Bagge, then the head of the Conservative Party.”

KL

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Kenneth S. Lynn

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A Life in Our Times By John Kenneth Galbraith Houghton Mifflin, 563 pp., $16.95 When George Orwell argued that every career looks like failure if viewed from the inside, he obviously had not envisioned John Kenneth Galbraith in the act of autobiographical assessment. In A Life in Our Times the erstwhile Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard not only exudes approval of himself from one end of the tale to the other, but also does not hesitate to include among the anecdotal illustrations of what a superior person he is a considerable number of stories that he had previously brought to our attention at least once if not several times in such earlier excursions into self-congratulation as Annals of an Abiding liberal. Ambassador’s Journal, Journey to Poland and Yugoslavia, The Scotch, and Economics, Peace, and Laughter. His invincible egotism has further prompted the memoirist to make space for lengthy quotations from The Affluent Society and other products of his pen, and to share with us the details of how many copies of his books have been sold, the number of translations they have achieved, the amount of money they have earned, and what admiring book reviewers have said about them.

Galbraith’s life story is also much given over to listings of his prominent friends, listings which are often unrelieved by any sort of characterization of the people in question, but which never fail to refer to their once or future fame. For the author’s desire to tell us what his friends are really like is not nearly as intense as his simple wish to let us know that his acquaintanceship is very wide. Hence he constantly confronts us with sentences that even a newspaper gossip columnist might find uninteresting: “In Stockholm I made the acquaintance of Bertil Ohlin, a later Nobel Prize winner and for long the leader of the Liberal Party; of the young Dag Hammarskjöld, then Undersecretary for Finance; of Karin Kock, later a government minister; and of Professor Gösta Bagge, then the head of the Conservative Party.”