Tweet		| Reader Comments

Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War IIJ. Todd Moye. Oxford Univ., $24.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-19-538655-4

Moye, associate professor of history at the University of North Texas, updates a now familiar story in this excellent history of the first African-American military pilots. Under pressure from black newspapers and the NAACP to open pilot training to blacks (and facing a re-election fight), President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 authorized the creation of a segregated flight school at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and an all-black fighter squadron. The program trained almost 1,000 fliers, and nearly half served in combat during WWII, compiling an impressive record flying 15,000 sorties in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. Despite official skepticism and occasional hostility, the Tuskegee Airmen successfully demonstrated “that racial segregation of troops was inefficient and... hindered national defense.” Their record helped persuade the air force—largely for “reasons of operational self-interest”—and President Harry Truman to seek the immediate desegregation of the military after the war. The author directed the National Park Service's Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project and mined some 800 interviews for his exhaustive research. Moye's lively prose and the intimate details of the personal narratives yield an accessible scholarly history that also succeeds as vivid social history. (Apr.)

Backing into Forward: A MemoirJules Feiffer. Doubleday/Talese, $30 (384p) ISBN 978-0-385-53158-0

Before Feiffer received a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, his animated Munro won an Oscar in 1961. His career encompassed everything from comic strips (Village Voice; Playboy), novels (Ackroyd) and plays (Little Murders) to children's books (Bark; George), nonfiction (The Great Comic Book Heroes) and screenplays (Carnal Knowledge; Popeye). Retracing his path of past creative pursuits, he takes anecdotal detours to introduce the talented people he met along the way. As a kid (he was born in 1929), drawing comic strip characters on the sidewalk was a way to avoid Bronx bullies: “I was never not afraid.” Serving an apprenticeship with cartoonist Will Eisner, he felt he was a fraud (“My line was soft where it should be hard, my figures amoebic when they should be overpowering”), so he instead graduated to ghostwriting Eisner's The Spirit. His account of hitchhiking cross-country invades Kerouac territory, while his ink-stained memories of the comics industry rival Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize—winning fictional portrait. Two years in the military gave Feiffer fodder for the trenchant Munro (about a child who is drafted). Such satirical social and political commentary became the turning point in his lust for fame, which finally happened, after many rejections, when acclaim for his anxiety-ridden Village Voice strips served as a springboard into other projects. Writing with wit, angst, honesty, and self-insights, Feiffer shares a vast and complex interior emotional landscape. Intimate and entertaining, his autobiography is a revelatory evocation of fear, ambition, dread, failure, rage, and, eventually, success. (Mar. 16)

Reporting at Wit's End: Tales from the New YorkerSt. Clair McKelway. Bloomsbury, $18 paper (640p) ISBN 978-1-60819-034-8

A rogue's gallery of shady, quirky, beguiling figures populates this scintillating collection of essays by one of the New Yorker's seldom-sung masters. Writing for the magazine from the 1930s through the 1960s, McKelway specialized in light true crime stories about arsonists, embezzlers, counterfeiters, suspected Communists, and innocent men and the fire investigators, forensic accountants, Secret Service men, clueless FBI agents, and biased cops who pursued them. He's fascinated by procedural, cat-and-mouse games and the sheer artistry of crime for crime's sake; his portrait of serial impostor Stanley Weyman is a gem of motiveless miscreancy, culminating in Weyman's impersonation of the (nonexistent) State Department Naval Liaison Officer in order to introduce one Princess Fatima of Afghanistan to President Harding. In addition to police blotter material, the author pens a cutting profile of the egomaniacal gossip columnist Walter Winchell and recollections of his war-time stint as an air force PR flack (with a rather blithe account of the firebombing of Tokyo). McKelway's deceptively straightforward prose accretes facts, testimony, and court documents into subtle character studies and unobtrusive ruminations on the crooked timber of humanity. His limpid style and wry humor make these pieces as fresh and engaging as the day they appeared. (Mar.)

Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the WorldNicholas Schou. St. Martin's/Dunne, $24.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-312-55183-4

Drug dealers with delusions of grandeur populate this colorful but overwrought history of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a 1960s-era narcotics ring—cum—hippie “church.” Influenced by psychedelic prophet Timothy Leary—who called the group's leader, former high school bully John Griggs, the “holiest man” in America—the California-based Brotherhood styled its cheap, extra-strength “Orange Sunshine” brand of LSD as a pathway to God. Journalist Schou (Kill the Messenger) takes the “spiritual purpose” of these “psychedelic warriors,” along with their solemn acid-dropping sacraments and utopian pipe dreams, rather too seriously. (He likewise inflates their sporadic ventures scoring Mexican marijuana and Afghan hashish into a “global smuggling empire.”) His narrative quickly devolves into a haphazard picaresque of drug deals, drug busts, overdoses, surfing, rock concerts (Jimi Hendrix does a cameo), orgies, and people living in teepees. Schou sometimes forgets that reading about other people's acid trips—“The whole sky took on huge forms of dancing Buddhas and the energy got really bright”—is a drag. Still, the mixture of lively freakery and stoned pomposity gives his portrait of countercultural excess an authentic period feel. (Mar.)

Spark: How Old-Fashioned Values Drive a Twenty-First Century CorporationFrank Koller. PublicAffairs, $25.95 (272p) ISBN 978-1-586-48795-9

Veteran journalist Koller goes inside Lincoln Electric, a Cleveland arc-welding equipment manufacturer dating back to 1895, a company that promises that no permanent employee who meets the firm's performance standards will ever be laid off due to lack of work. This promise is so sacrosanct, it's included in the employee handbook and in the organization's annual report. The company has also paid out profit-sharing bonuses without fail since 1934, bonuses which almost always exceed 60% of an employee's basic earnings. Koller offers a fascinating glimpse into this remarkable yet, in many ways, ordinary organization, which survives, even thrives, in a sunset industry where overseas outsourcing is the norm. Readers follow the company through the days of Carnegie and Rockefeller, recessions in the 1950s, and the present crisis, and witness how it weathers challenges. Instructive and heartening, this book offers a proven model for companies that not only want healthy bottom lines but also satisfied, dedicated employees. (Feb.)

From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional LawMartha C. Nussbaum. Oxford Univ., $21.95 (208p) ISBN 978-0-19-530531-9

A meticulous consideration of the legal issues surrounding same-sex relations grounded in a far-reaching investigation of how the notion of disgust has determined both civil legislation and public opinion. Identifying a politics of disgust that centers on irrational fears of contamination, “penetrability,” and loss of social “solidarity,” Nussbaum (Hiding from Humanaity) opposes such problematic foundations for legislation with her own notion of a politics of humanity, based on the need for imaginative engagement with others. Linking imagination with America's founding principles of equality and respect, the author vindicates sexual orientation rights as instrumental to the pursuit of happiness, before engaging with contentious rulings on same-sex marriage, sodomy, and discrimination. An elegant and eloquent defender of sexual freedom, the author is at her best describing the insidious role of disgust in law. However, her frequent recourse to John Stuart Mill would seem to demand a more detailed defense of his ideas on harm, and her reflections on marriage add little to the debate. Nonetheless, as the recent public discourse about empathy among Supreme Court judges indicates, Nussbaum's passionate advocacy of the power of imagination is profound and timely. (Feb.)

When Things Get Dark:A Mongolian Winter's TaleMatthew Davis. St. Martin's, $25.99 (288p) ISBN 978-0-312-60773-9

Davis, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, recounts his two eventful years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching in a small Mongolian town in his knowledgeable yet convoluted memoir. As a 23-year-old Midwesterner, nothing prepared him for the former Communist satellite, which is largely rural and teeming with the legacy of the Great Khan, yaks and goats being herded on the rugged steppes. Davis sees a landscape on the brink of change and a young population eager for a better life depicted in Internet cafes and media from the outside world. Yet the isolation and culture shock plunge him into “a dangerous place psychologically,” and alcohol abuse and mayhem result in a brutal drunken fight. Other than some standard travelogue facts on Mongolian history and culture, Davis is correct when he concludes that his brief Mongolian journey was like “a flutter of an eyelid” and subsequently will feel the same way to the reader. (Feb.)

Catching Out: Life in a Day Labor HallDick J. Reavis. Simon & Schuster, $23.99 (352p) ISBN 978-1-4391-5479-3

Though a writer and English professor by trade, Reavis found himself taking on the role of a day laborer to help supplement his retirement and savings. Appearing at the local labor hall to “catch out,” that is, get picked for a job, Reavis, who wrote about illegal immigrants in his first book, Without Documents, becomes one of the millions of Americans who work all manner of manual labor gigs and are, economically and socially, “living on the edge,” as he lugs boxes, digs ditches, and hauls debris with fellow workers. Despite each of the jobs being unrelated, the book is held together by Reavis's central focus on the plight of a working class that has no health insurance, for the most part must rely on others for transportation, and, in many cases, may not even have a home to return to at the end of a long day. Also to his benefit, Reavis allows his colleagues—hard drinkers like Real Deal, shirkers like Tommy, softies like Office Skills, and hard workers like Sung—to take center stage in his tales, which run the gamut from humorous to heartrending. This ability to bring the small successes, daily struggles, and measured dreams of these “down-at-heels” working stiffs makes the book's final chapter, in which Reavis outlines the legal and economic reforms needed to help day laborers get fair wages and treatment, overwhelmingly persuasive. (Feb.)

A Few Good Women: America's Military Women from World War I to the War in Iraq and AfghanistanEvelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee. Knopf, $30 (512p) ISBN 978-1-4000-4434-4

Foreign enemies are less challenging than domestic ones in this earnest history of women's struggle for entry into and acceptance within the armed forces. Ex-army psychologist Monahan and ex-navy nurse Neidel-Greenlee (coauthors of And If I Perish: Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in World War II) argue that while America has increasingly relied on women to perform crucial military tasks, sometimes under fire, reactionaries in the military and Congress, citing feminine delicacy and other hoary sexist myths, have resisted according them the status, equal pay, opportunities, and respect they deserve. The authors adorn their chronicle of hard-fought institutional change with the generally gung-ho recollections of women soldiers, from WWII's WAACs and WAVEs to today's female machine gunners and paratroopers. The authors reserve their heaviest fire for those who oppose putting women in combat roles, especially Sen. James Webb; in a vitriolic critique, they conjecture that God invented death for the express purpose of ridding the world of people like Webb “who prefer subjective opinions to objective facts....” This is an occasionally inspiring, but often plodding and doctrinaire account of America's women in uniform. 83 photos. (Feb. 24)

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies StrongerRichard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, foreword by Robert B. Reich. Bloomsbury, $28 (352p) ISBN 978-1-60819-036-2

Wilkinson and Pickett make an eloquent case that the income gap between a nation's richest and poorest is the most powerful indicator of a functioning and healthy society. Amid the statistics that support their argument (increasing income disparity sees corresponding spikes in homicide, obesity, drug use, mental illness, anxiety, teenage pregnancies, high school dropouts—even incidents of playground bullying), the authors take an empathetic view of our ability to see beyond self-interest. While there are shades of Darwinism in the human hunt for status, there is evidence that the human brain—with its distinctively large neocortex—evolved the way it has because we were designed to be attentive to, depend on, and be depended on by others. Wilkinson and Pickett do not advocate one way or the other to close the equality gap. Government redistribution of wealth and market forces that create wealth can be equally effective, and the authors provide examples of both. How societies achieve equality, they argue, is less important than achieving it in the first place. Felicitous prose and fascinating findings make this essential reading. (Jan.)

Money for Nothing: How the Failure of Corporate Boards Is Ruining American Business and Costing Us TrillionsJohn Gillespie and David Zweig. Free Press, $27 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4165-5993-1

Gillespie, a former investment banker with Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, and Bear Sterns; and Zweig, business consultant and Salon.com founder, blow the whistle on the insular, apathetic, and dangerously lackadaisical world of corporate boards. Of the world's 200 largest economies, more than half are corporations, whose economic might is matched by their political and environmental sway. While the media highlights misbehaving moguls, boards work behind closed doors, and their substantial impact often goes unnoticed. These boards, described by the authors as predominantly made up of white men in their '60s, make their decisions “based on the fact that it's not their money,” and the trickle-down effect onto ordinary people is enormous. While Gillespie and Zweig sew in just enough juicy tales of mismanagement and scandalous misbehavior, they make a genuine effort to highlight representative issues and portray corporate leadership in all its complexity, instead of as a simplistic morality tale. They take a running jump at solutions and reforms that might help boards work more effectively and ethically. Both thoughtful and lively, this is a fascinating discussion of a little-seen force in corporate America. (Jan.)

Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic CulturePaul Gilroy. Harvard Univ., $22.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-674-03570-6

Gilroy (Against Race) offers a shrewd and invigorating discussion—originally delivered as the W.E.B. Du Bois lectures at Harvard University—poised on the fraught intersections of race, class, and status present in the overlapping histories of African-American popular culture, the automobile as American capitalism's “ur-commodity,” and the race-coded global reach of American style. Paying special attention to musical vernacular—from Robert Johnson to 50 Cent—Gilroy's stimulating reappraisal of the seductions of car culture underscores how status improvement for minorities has shifted from acquiring rights to acquiring objects. At the same time, he argues for the anticonsumerist notes struck by such “responsible troubadours” as Marvin Gaye and Bob Marley. Gilroy demonstrates how understanding black experience is crucial in any serious study of modernity itself, at a time when global capitalism trades evermore in American-inflected styles of “blackness,” while simultaneously maintaining and reinforcing lines of racial and class subjugation. While assuming familiarity with Du Bois and latter-day Marxist cultural analysis, this is a reasonably accessible and highly rewarding read for anyone interested in the social and political significance of mass culture or the historically laden language of human rights in a postcolonial age. (Jan.)

'Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African AmericaFrances Smith Foster. Oxford Univ., $21.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-19-532852-3

Faced with “a plethora of stories about promiscuous coupling and fatherless families, instability, and group dysfunction,” Foster (Written by Herself) illuminates the African-American historical experience of love and marriage through the stories “that antebellum African Americans told among themselves.” She relies particularly on the records of the 18th century Free African Union Societies of Newport, R.I., and Philadelphia and 19th-century slave narratives along with contemporaneous novels and poems. The most groundbreaking content stems from the Afro-Protestant press periodicals, which are “treasure troves of ideas, experiences, and ideals.” She has more on her mind than emending the historical record; after leaving the antebellum period, where she amply demonstrates that African-American marriage “was frequent, that family ties were strong,” she embarks on digressive journeys. Her meditations—on “negative contemporary narratives,” the work of various social scientists (“friendly fire in our battle to be a free people in a free country”), her daughter's wedding, and the Defense of Marriage Act—somewhat dilute the richness of her primary theme. Still, readers will be freshly informed by the historical and, perhaps, engaged by the tangential. (Jan.)

Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack ObamaPeniel E. Joseph. Basic Civitas, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-0-465-01366-1

Joseph (Waiting'til the Midnight Hour) launches a much needed discussion of black power's successes and its contributions to the civil rights movement. Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael were, first and foremost, community organizers—as was Barack Obama, whose trajectory, according to the author, represents the culmination and redemption of his predecessors' efforts. Joseph examines two paths to black social justice—“black power” and the pulpit-driven civil rights movement—which popular history has traditionally pitted in opposition. Even if Carmichael's bracing criticism of American democracy or the Panthers' militancy seem miles away from King's pacifism, Joseph reveals how the two approaches fed off of each other, creating the kind of conflict and progress that would pave the way for the first African-American president, whose political roots are planted in activism. The author makes a persuasive and stimulating case for Obama's election as a vindication for black power, and his book is a vivid and welcome recasting of the history—and the myriad interpretations—of the movement. (Jan.)

Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to CarnismMelanie Joy. Conari, $19.95 (176p) ISBN 978-1-57324-461-9

Despite a penchant for melodrama, Joy (Strategic Action for Animals) offers an absorbing examination of why humans feel affection and compassion for certain animals but are callous to the suffering of others—especially those slaughtered for our consumption. She takes Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan, and Jonathan Safran Foer's well-trod route and investigates factory farming, exposing how cruelly the animals are treated, the hazards that meatpacking workers face, and the environmental impact of raising 10 billion animals for food each year. She uses her factory farm—to—table narrative to buttress her real thesis: meat-eating or “carnism,” is an oppressive ideology as noxious as racism. Joy casts meat eating as genocide, comparable to the Holocaust, and factory farming on a par with the American enslavement of Africans. She might lose some readers in her zealotry, but there is great value in her contention that all systems of oppression depend on our ability to dissociate or find elaborate rationalizations to keep from recognizing the suffering of a socially sanctioned inferior. (Jan.)

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things RightAtul Gawande. Metropolitan, $24 (224p) ISBN 978-0-8050-9174-8

That humblest of quality-control devices, the checklist, is the key to taming a high-tech economy, argues this stimulating manifesto. Harvard Medical School prof and New Yorker scribe Gawande (Complications) notes that the high-pressure complexities of modern professional occupations overwhelm even their best-trained practitioners; he argues that a disciplined adherence to essential procedures—by ticking them off a list—can prevent potentially fatal mistakes and corner cutting. He examines checklists in aviation, construction, and investing, but focuses on medicine, where checklists mandating simple measures like hand washing have dramatically reduced hospital-caused infections and other complications. Gawande gets slightly intoxicated over checklists, celebrating their most banal manifestations as promethean breakthroughs (“First there was the recipe, the most basic checklist of all,” he intones in a restaurant kitchen). He's at his best delivering his usual rich, insightful reportage on medical practice, where checklists have the subversive effect of puncturing the cult of physician infallibility and fostering communication and teamwork. (After writing a checklist for his specialty, surgery, he is chagrined when it catches his own disastrous lapses.) Gawande gives a vivid, punchy exposition of an intriguing idea: that by-the-book routine trumps individual prowess. (Jan.)

Healing Hearts: A Memoir of a Female Heart SurgeonKathy Magliato, M.D.Broadway, $24 (272p) ISBN 978-0-7679-3026-0

In her amazing memoir, Magliato belies the myth of surgeons as distant, cocky, robotic—and male. Yet she also bluntly explains why, as one of the world's very few female heart surgeons, she once relied on the psychological “full metal jacket.” “Sometimes, it was the only thing holding me together,” she says of the distance she needed during an insanely grueling training in cardiac surgery. Magliato describes the bloody trenches of the operating theater; the vulnerable patients who are saved or who die; and the juggling of a demanding career with her role as wife and mother. However, it's the doctor's tender heart that makes her far more than a “healing robot.” Recounting one patient's dying moments, Magliati acknowledges that she was unable to help the woman live but is proud that, at the least, “I gave her... a beautiful exit from this world. When it's my time to go, that's how I want to die. In the arms of my son.” Look for sobering statistics on women and heart disease, and an inspiring example of living and loving life to the fullest. (Jan.)

Emissary of the Doomed: Bargaining for Lives in the HolocaustRonald Florence. Viking, $27.95 (352p) ISBN 978-0-670-02072-0

In a taut, detailed narrative, historian Florence (A Blood Libel) relates Joel Brand's efforts to save Hungary's Jews from the Holocaust. In April 1944, Brand, a disheveled Jewish businessman was living in Budapest, working with fellow Zionists on a secret rescue committee. He met with notorious SS officer Adolf Eichmann (responsible for shipping Eastern European Jews to the death camps), who offered to sell Brand the freedom of almost a million Hungarian Jews for 10,000 heavy-duty military trucks. With this offer, Brand contacted the Allies and the Jewish Agency in Palestine. The Jewish Agency's Moshe Shertok, though incredulous, presented the proposal to the British high commissioner in Palestine, who asserted Eichmann's proposal was another Nazi intrigue and Brand a Nazi agent. Brand was eventually jailed in Cairo by the British. Some questioned Brand's competence, but Brand himself always believed his mission had been betrayed by Jewish Agency officials who couldn't grasp the reality of the Final Solution. Although Brand's story is known—particularly through his testimony in two postwar trials (including Eichmann's in 1961), Florence (Lawrence and Aaronsohn) paints a colorful but dispiriting tale of mankind's gross inhumanity. (Jan.)

The Power of Women: Harness Your Unique Strengths at Home, at Work, and in Your CommunitySusan Nolen-Hoeksema. Times, $25 (336p) ISBN 978-0-8050-8867-0

According to Yale psychology professor Nolen-Hoeksema (Women Who Think Too Much), women have unique mental strengths. Neither conformist nor rigid, women find many pathways to their goals and work toward getting a job done rather than getting their way. Women, the author says, utilize their strengths to lead children, partners, neighbors, and colleagues to better lives; believing that every woman has the capacity to be strong no matter how beaten down she feels. Nolen-Hoeksema offers numerous case studies as well as tools and exercises (e.g., a “Breaking Down Obstacles Worksheet” motivates readers to take small steps to tackle obstacles to their important goals; an exercise shows readers how to make contracts with themselves and give themselves a reward when they achieve a difficult task). Although these tools are useful and Nolen-Hoeksema's advice lucid, if familiar, it's questionable whether stressed-out women will adopt the time-finding worksheet or other time-consuming exercises. Moreover, the book's gender emphasis feels dated and biased: it's not clear why the advice applies particularly to women. (Jan.)

Hardboiled Hollywood: The True Crime Stories Behind the Classic Noir FilmsMax Décharné. Pegasus (Norton, dist.), $25 (304p) ISBN 978-1-60598-076-8; paper $14.95 ISBN 978-1-60598-083-6

Décharné, a member of the British band the Flaming Stars, tackles some literary noir scenarios and true murder tales as prime inspirations for some of the finest crime films produced in Hollywood. He analyzes the thrill gangsters held for the masses when screenwriters put them into films from the 1930s until the present, producing overnight stars like Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, and Humphrey Bogart. Although sometimes the book seems like a tame clip job, it does provide the rare eye-opening revelation about the featured films and the real-life or literary events behind their creation: the story of Al Capone behind Little Caesar; the experiences leading Raymond Chandler to write his novel turned movie The Big Sleep; the realities and myths behind the protagonists of Bonnie and Clyde; and the 1950s Los Angeles world of crime and scandal behind the novel and movie L.A. Confidential. Rehashing several familiar Tinseltown tidbits and uncovering very little new material about these landmark offerings, Décharné's work is not an essential reference volume for the entertainment book shelf. (Jan.)

Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many RiddlesPanthea Reid. Rutgers Univ., $34.95 (464p) ISBN 978-0-8135-4637-7

Attempting to solve “the riddle” of Tillie Lerner Olsen, literary scholar Reid paints a warts-and-all portrait of the woman who became an iconic feminist and admired writer. The author of the celebrated stories “I Stand Here Ironing” and “Tell Me a Riddle” was, according to Reid, an imperious narcissist who used her charisma to cover her inadequacies. But Reid also presents Olsen's life as a metaphor for the 20th century, encompassing Communist activism, WWII patriotism, early feminism, and civil rights activism. Olsen (1912—2007), born in Omaha, Neb., to poor Russian Jewish immigrants, displayed early on a magnetic personality, verbal prowess, and what would become a lifelong habit of lying. A Communist during the 1930s, Olsen was thrust into the limelight after being jailed during a San Francisco dockworkers' strike. Putting the Party before personal loyalties, she neglected her daughter, was unfaithful to her husband, and took an advance from Random House without delivering a novel. A second marriage to fellow Communist Jack Olsen was happier, but sputtered as she finally tried to publish a book in 1974. Reid, author of biographies of Faulkner and Woolf, paints a deftly engrossing, nuanced, and meticulously researched portrait of a perplexing, larger-than-life woman. Photos. (Jan.)

The Generosity Plan: Sharing Your Time, Treasure, and Talent to Shape the WorldKathy LeMay. Atria/Beyond Words, $15 paper (272p) ISBN 978-1-58270-234-6

Professional global activist LeMay (founder and head of Raising Change), sets out to accomplish a twofold task with her inspirational handbook. First, she ventures to redefine the word “philanthropist” as an egalitarian title that can apply to the masses as well as the rich. The second is to show readers, step-by-step, just how easy it is to be philanthropic, regardless of personality or personal budget. LeMay's success on both counts emerges from her commitment to her causes, the disarming candor of her personal stories of triumph, and the thoughtful discussion points and charts she provides to structure the financial planning process for giving on any salary. Unfortunately, the book's greatest strength is also its weakness—LeMay's well-presented plan is not a quick solution, but requires time, thought, and preparation. Hopefully, readers will be inspired by her characterization of philanthropy as an act of leadership and bravery in a world that is desperately wanting, rather than be discouraged by the long journey ahead. (Jan.)

Also on PW

PW's Libraries Page

PW's Best Books of 2011

Tale of the Tablets: Comparing New Devices more...