Web Exclusive Review: Bill Clinton's 'Giving'

-- Publishers Weekly, 9/4/2007 8:00:00 AM

Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World
Bill Clinton. Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-307-26674-3

Expounding the varieties of charitable endeavor, this homily by the 42nd president--whose own Clinton Foundation battles everything from pediatric AIDS to childhood obesity--uncritically surveys a vast philanthropic landscape, from the humble Goodwill clothing drive to Jeffrey Sachs’s grand Millenium Villages initiative to revamp the socio-economic order of the Third World. The book’s heart is in its many profiles of individual do-gooders—from Bill Gates to six-year-old McKenzie Steiner, who organized a beach clean-up—complete with “why-we-give” sermonettes (e.g. McKenzie’s concern that animals might be killed by litter). In these formulaic vignettes, a kindly soul perceives an unmet need and bootstraps an organization to confront it; the climax is always a montage of the results, complete with burgeoning statistics. These stories are sometimes inspiring, occasionally piquant (“Locks of Love provides more than 200 hairpieces a year to children in all fifty states and Canada”), but often as eye-glazing as Clinton's memoir could be (“LISC operations have created more than 70,000 jobs, helped more than 100 businesses, developed 53 supermarkets and farmers’ markets, built 120 child-care facilities for 11,000 kids, renovated 136 playing fields serving 120,000 children, and financed 80 schools for 28,000 students.”) Readers who make it through the book will feel like they ought to do a bit more to save the world. (Sept. 4)