“Through his parsing of a lifetime's work, Richard Parker makes a strong case that John Kenneth Galbraith has been foresighted -- about the role of military spending in national policy, about the power of widespread but inaccurate public beliefs, about the gap between executives' interests and shareholders' or employees', about the nature of bubbles and the permanence of greed -- and right more often than wrong (mainly about the ability of major U.S. corporations to squash all competition).”

— James Fallows, The New York Observer

“Always heard and never heeded, John Kenneth Galbraith haunts this account of his own life, giving way for much of Richard Parker's text to the powerful men and forces Galbraith sought to guide and failed to steer. Galbraith advised John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, served as ambassador to India and bete noire to Richard Nixon, wrote 40-some books of which at least three earned enduring popularity despite their distinctive prose and complex ideas, taught decades of Harvard undergraduates, yet left little imprint on the public policy or economic theory of our time and what mark he made is fading fast.”

— Eric Alterman  with Eric Rauchway, Altercation

“What makes Parker's biography valuable, however, is his ability to place Galbraith in a sweeping and comprehensive history of the evolution of economic thought, and to keep sight of his subject's continuing relevance to the present day.”

— Geoffrey Kabaservice, The Washington Post

“Richard Parker's portrait of the dynamic Galbraith excels in both detail and scope. Meticulous in attention to the economic field, it also provides a sweeping, panoramic picture of the intense ideological tides that seethed beneath the surface of a turbulent century.”

— Robert Nash, The Dallas Morning News

“John Kenneth Galbraith was famous long ago as America's most widely read economist, until his expansive understanding of economic liberalism was pushed aside by political events and conservative ideology. Galbraith is still alive, however, and at 96 still writing provocative books (his latest, The Economics of Innocent Fraud, was a
bestseller last year in Britain). Let's hope the professor is around long enough to enjoy a Galbraith revival. His books, I feel certain,
are going to come back in vogue. When the right's rigid ideology falters and breaks down, sooner perhaps than people imagine, Americans
will need an explanation for what went wrong. They can read Galbraith.”

— William Greider, The Nation

“Professor John Kenneth Galbraith leans back on his chaise longue and answers the question about the book: I think its fine. I couldnt have done it better if I had written it myself. The reference is to John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics, by Richard Parker. Did you read it?

Yes.

The whole thing? I bet you didnt.

But his visitor had read it all, 800 pages, pronouncing it the most readable and instructive biography  certainly of the century.”

— William F. Buckley Jr., National Review

“John Kenneth Galbraith projected a towering presence--Richard Parker's rich, fascinating, authorized biography of the most famous economist since John Maynard Keynes tells a terrific story--actually dozens of them--and opens a compelling window on the course of 20th Century American liberalism.”

— Warren Goldstein, Chicago Tribune

“Richard Parker has produced a rich, well-written and fittingly large monument to this super-sized intellectual of the 20th century.”

— Stephen Clarkson, Globe and Mail

“Globe and Mail names JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH: His Life, His Politics, His Economics one of the Top 100 Books of 2005.”

— Globe and Mail

“While Galbraith has suggested that his move to journalism was almost a matter of chance, Parker has mined the Time, Inc. archives to uncover a more elaborate, two-way courtship.”

— John Geddes, Nieman Reports

“For twenty years in the middle of the last century, John Kenneth Galbraith was the best known living economist. But he was not then, and will never be, regarded as a great economist by economists , because he produced no theories, which is what great economists are supposed to do.”

— Robert  Skidelsky, Journal of Economic Literature

“The New York Times names JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH: His Life, His Politics, His Economics one of the Top 100 Books of 2005.”

— The New York Times

“As a wonderful new biography, John Kenneth Galbraith, His Life, His Politics, His Economics by Richard Parker, makes clear, despite some minor differences he adhered to the essential teachings of Keynes.”

— William Keegan, The Observer, London

“If one individual could be singled out as the "economist of the American Century," John Kenneth Galbraith would certainly be a prime candidate. During the course of his long life, which spans most of the 20th century to the present day, Galbraith has filled many roles: economic thinker, government official, diplomat, writer and star of his own "Age of Uncertainty" television series on PBS.”

— [email protected]

“John Kenneth Galbraith, along with Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr., was one of the founding fathers of post-World War II American liberalism.”

— Fred Siegel, Blueprint

“Since I can't go back to 1949 (or, my real preference, 1849), let me be ultra-contemporary in choosing my favorite progressive book in the last 15 years--and name Richard Parker's John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics.”

— Sean Wilentz, The American Prospect

“Richard Parker's comprehensive biography arrives at an appropriate time; many of the basic assumptions of orthodox economic theory that Galbraith challenged for much of his career are now being questioned within the orthodox tradition itself.”

— Jeff Madrick, The New York Review of Books

“Ken Galbraith has the good fortune of a biographer who knows everything and has had the patience to write it down. There will never be a bigger or better or more reverential biography of Galbraith. I say this with the confidence of foresight. The subtitle, His Life, His Politics, His Economics, is too modest. The book is also an account of the politics and economics of the United States from the New Deal to the present; the personalities, the diplomatic history, and the history of economic thought in Galbraiths time, because Galbraith either counseled or opposed everybody in the upper spheres of public life and polemicized in the lower spheres for what passes as economic thought.”

— Mike Sharpe, Challenge

“John Kenneth Galbraith's dazzling career as an economist and public intellectual has left an oddly thin legacy. A new biography sets out to explain why -- tracing, in the process, the rise and fall of twentieth-century American liberalism.”

— J. Bradford  DeLong, Foreign Affairs

“The book traces the life of the liberal intellectual icon, from his childhood in rural Canada to the present day.
”

— NPR, Morning Edition

“Doing justice to this life story requires an outsize biography, one that not only tells Mr Galbraith's tale but sets it on the broader canvas of America's political and economic evolution. And Richard Parker's book does just that.”

— The Economist

“Trying to tell the story of John Kenneth Galbraith's life would be a daunting task for any biographer.

Galbraith has written 48 books -- his latest, "The Economics of Innocent Fraud," came out last year -- that have sold more than 7.5 million copies and have been translated into nearly three dozen languages. He also has written more than 1,000 articles and essays for newspapers and magazines around the world over the past 70 years.”

— Randy Holhut, Brattleboro Reformer

“In the last half-century, John Kenneth Galbraith has been the most famous and widely read economist in the world.”

— David Loftus, The Oregonian

“Richard Parker's majestic biography is as much the story of the rise and fall of an intellectual tradition as it is of one man. It is a work of scholarship that manages to be a page-turner, as Parker brings to life both the man and the decades through which he lived, especially the 1960s. The retelling of how Galbraith understands American capitalism is formidable; at bottom Galbraith has always seen capitalism through the prism of power, in particular how corporations shape the environment in which they operate -- a mismatch between reality and the power-neutral world described by free-market, so-called classical economists that is devastatingly wide but, as Galbraith would say, has been self-interestedly designed to obscure the truth.”

— Will Hutton, The American Prospect

“Parker's immediate contribution is a biography that will make readers more economically and politically aware. Parker hopes Galbraith's story will help us 'understand something larger about where we are all now going.'”

— Lyn Millner, USA Today

“Yet reading Parker's comprehensive account of the 20th century's economic battles, I can't help thinking that this ought to be Galbraith's moment. An old-school scoffer like Galbraith would remind us that all our elected officials have done with their heady incantations of the virtues of privatizing Social Security and the glories of deregulation is resurrect the superstitions of our orthodox ancestors, and trade in our affluent society for a faith-based 19th-century model in which the affluence accrues only to the top.”

— Thomas Frank, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

“There was a time when John Kenneth Galbraith was the most famous economist in America, a man whose books regularly became best sellers. But today he is little honored in the economics profession, where, as Richard Parker remarks in his engaging and exhaustive biography, Mr. Galbraith is regarded as something of an outsider, a fine writer who never became comfortable with the detailed mathematical formulas that came to dominate economics.
”

— Floyd Norris, The New York Times

“Richard Parker's biography is a thoroughgoing account of that long and varied life. It is richly informative and clearly written, even when treating more recondite matters of economic theory. It is a largely uncritical biography but not an unbalanced one, because Parker is always at pains to tell the reader what Galbraith's opponents, whether in the academy or in the hurly-burly world of politics, were thinking.
”

— Steve Fraser, Los Angeles Times

“In addition to lucidly explaining the economic theories of Galbraith and his opponents, Parker includes lively chapters about his subject's ambassadorship to India, influence on President John F. Kennedy, leadership in organizing dissent against U.S. involvement in Vietnam, genesis of bestselling books ("The Affluent Society," to mention one), his family life filled with joys and sorrows and much more.”

— Steve Weinberg, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“In Parker's thorough 787-page account of Galbraith's remarkable life, the chapters on his place in Kennedy's Camelot are perhaps the most gripping. Part of the reason is the enduring fascination with the tragic presidency itself. But another aspect is the way Galbraith's status in JFK's circle stands as a high point in his career as a public intellectual.”

— John Geddes, Maclean's

“JOHN KENNETH Galbraith coined the phrase "conventional wisdom," and again and again, across a lifetime, he has shown how to transcend it. I have just read an early copy of "John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics" by Richard Parker, and the story of this man's life and work, wonderfully rendered in this magnum opus, offers an antidote to the public ennui, economic cruelty, and government malfeasance that poison life in America today.

”

— James Carroll, The Boston Globe

“Parker's biography is a model of clarity ...  The author, who is altogether sympathetic to his subject, never shrinks from offering others' tough, and his own measured, judgments. Galbraith emerges as highly appealing, a man of sparkling wit liked by most of his intellectual opponents and deprecated chiefly by his hard-boiled fellow economists. While they'll long debate his contributions to economics, there's no denying, as this book makes indelibly clear, that Galbraith, has been one of the major American lives of the 20th century.”

— Publishers Weekly

“Don't read because it will improve the inner workings of your brain, nor because it will make you seem more cultured to other people. Don't read just because it will give you a greater understanding of the world outside your immediate experience. Read because it is one of life's great pleasures. Listed here are titles to look out for in 2005 ...
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH: HIS LIFE, HIS POLITICS, HIS ECONOMICS by Richard Parker; Farrar Straus & Giroux. The authorized biography of one of the most prominent economists of our time. (Feb.)
”

— U.S. News & World Report

“A fittingly oversized life of the eminent economist, philosopher, writer, and diplomat.
”

— Kirkus Reviews