Galbraith up close.(on the right)(biography book about John Kenneth Galbraith written by Richard Parker )

NEW YORK, MARCH 4

PROFESSOR John Kenneth Galbraith leans back on his chaise longue and answers the question about the book: "I think it's fine. I couldn't 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 didn't."

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

Richard Parker is an economist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. His political and economic dispositions are most quickly identified by noting that he was the co-founder of Mother Jones, a leftist monthly missal. As one might expect, the biography comprehensively endorses the life work of the most influential economist since Lord Keynes. If there isn't a proper Galbraith legacy--as, for instance, there is a Milton Friedman legacy--at least there is this infinitely engaging memorial.

Galbraith, as every kindergartner knows, is a Canadian who grew up on the farm, took on agricultural economics, went to Berkeley for his doctorate, then to Washington, where he drank deep of the New Deal. He officiated over the wartime Office of Price Administration, which told 185 million people how much they could pay for a Tootsie Roll, and went on to Fortune magazine. Henry Luce is quoted as saying that he taught Galbraith how to write, and had regretted it ever since. This is not convincing--Galbraith was already, in 1944, an accomplished writer, as evidenced by quotations from him in this biography.