John Kenneth Galbraith: a great mind passes

As I went to sleep at 2 a.m. PT, listening to the radio, (CoasttoCoastAM - link in sidebar) the news reported that John Kenneth Galbraith passed away. Amazingly, I found not one word of this on MSN as I logged onto my "homepage" a bit after 9 a.m. PT. (Yes, I spelled his name correctly.) yet I read Keith Richards fell out of a palm tree (?????) in Fiji and is in the hospital. As a longtime Stones fan I am mildly interested, but a great mind is gone and there is no mention- not even in MSN's "Popular Searches." I proceeded to a Google search (web) and saw no mention. Clicking on "News" finally brings up 4 unique links that mention his death. FOUR! Not one of the four- before the link to the other 315 sites- is based in the US: BBC News, RTE (Ireland), Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, and freakin' Aljazeera.net!!! Little, Brown's recent shame (Kaavya Viswanathan for those of you with your heads in the ground) was everywhere in the media and she is no one special. What gives? Is America that dumbed down? Apparently it is.

OOOOH. OOOOH, OOOOH- A page refresh informs me Don Johnson and his wife had a baby boy. Didn't know "they" were pregnant and don't care. I imagine if the digustingly named "Brangelina" had dropped their swaddling bundle the earth would have stood still. We are in a very sorry state of affairs.

Regardless of one's political views, Galbraith was an intellectual, a thinker. Some of his thoughts can be found in "Conversations with History (Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley): Intellectual Journey: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom: Conversation with John Kenneth Galbraith," from March 27, 1986, an interview with Galbraith covering a broad spectrum- including writing.

A bibliography of Galbraith's 48 books can be found here . If you wish to buy any of his well-written, completely original and thoroughly researched books (a very unique concept in this day and age), they can be found for sale at your local independent bookstore or by searching by title and/or author at Bookfinder or ADDALL