Angus Deaton—Scottish immigrant, Nobelist, and one of Cardiff’s favorite economists—has written a new, forthcoming book titled Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explore the Land of Inequality.

It’s great, if also hard to categorize.

Partly it’s a memoir, about his humble origins in Scotland, where he was born; his studies at Cambridge with better-heeled peers; and his subsequent decades as a Princeton University, Nobel Prize winning economist.

The book is also partly a reflection on a lifetime of practicing economics, and the good and bad of the economics profession. There’s plenty of both.

And finally it’s a series of observations about the American economy, including a fascinating self-analysis of his own ambivalence towards the US, his adopted country—the many great things here, including the lives that he and his family have led; and also, yes, some of the devastatingly grim things about life here for so many others.