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[This individual, who wrote "A Beautiful Mind" now breezily takes us
down a journey through the history of political economy.  The
following is a comment I posted on Amazon about her]

Yes, I've got to say I watched Ms. Nasar being interviewed on CSPN2's
Book-TV on 9/17/11 in which she gave an atrocious presentation worthy
of a Saturday Night Live caricature. It seemed every fourth word was
"ya know"; all she needed was to be chewing gum to flesh out the role.
Turns out she's considered a serious intellectual, but unfortunately
didn't have any critique of Karl Marx's ideas besides glibly tossing
out shopworn personal attacks against him. Yes, as Ms. Nasar stated,
Isaiah Berlin's biography is an excellent and fair overview of Marx's
life and work, but one that will set one straight from notions bandied
about by Ms. Nasar that Marx was a rich idler. In reality, he lived in
difficult circumstances most of his life, struggling hard to make ends
meet, having been evicted from numerous rentals along with his family
and with more than one of his children dying because he couldn't
afford to provide them necessary medical care. Edmund Wilson's review
of Marx in "To the Finland Station" gives a similar take on Marx's
life and work with more inquiry into his personal life and foibles and
the conditions of economic hardship he struggled with; for sure not as
tough as those of the workers in the industrial slums of Manchester,
but by no means a bourgois life of ease and comfort either.

Thus, both authors would find preposterous Ms. Nasar's assertion that
Marx, as opposed possibly to Engels who was the scion of a prosperous
Anglo-German capitalist family, had income within the top 5% of
British households. Moreover, the idea that Marx as an economist,
intellectual and activist had his work subsidized by others is
unremarkable. It is also incontestable that he produced, in addition
to collaborative projects with Engels and others, a massive body of
work on his own, most notably his magnum opus Das Kapital.

What person in that situation is not subsidized by grants, donations
or a salary unless he or she is independently wealthy? Ms. Nasar at
Columbia? How often did Alfred Marshall step out of a library? who
knows? what does it matter? Why substitute petty gossip for
confronting the ideas of these thinkers? I will defer judgment until I
peruse her written work but at this point Ms. Nasar comes across like
a superficial media pundit and a political hack and not as a serious
academic. It needs noting that according to Wikipedia, Ms.Nasar's
family background is with the CIA.

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