Women in Calcutta waiting in line for food during the Bengal famine of 1943 © William Vandivert/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

As the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen approaches ninety, he has written a moving and urgent memoir, Home in the World (Liveright, $30), in which he lays out the early influences on his life and work, particularly his groundbreaking studies about famine, welfare economics, and social-choice theory, for which he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998.

From the first, Sen was marked for great things: his maternal grandfather, the renowned Sanskrit scholar Kshiti…