Ninety-Seven Years and Counting

What a life John Kenneth Galbraith has led! Reading this new biography by Kennedy School economist Richard Parker, you feel you have been dropped into a William Boyd novel, The New Confessions, say, or Any Human Heart, whose heroes roam through the 20th century meeting all the great characters. Galbraith, who turns 97 on October 15, has not been quite as peripatetic as Zelig. But for range and improbability he is not far off. Consider his 20th-century itinerary:

Born 1908 on a farm in Iona Station, in the Scots country of southwestern Ontario. Father a Liberal activist and mentor of Mitch Hepburn. Mother died when he was 15, she only 50. Young Ken is raised on books. Landmark day of his childhood: when the local library eliminates the two-book borrowing limit. Even so, repeats his senior year of high school. Majors in animal husbandry at Ontario Agricultural College, now Guelph University. Graduates late, because of illness and ill preparation...