With a light dose of narrative background and a heavy emphasis on an interview format, Endlich (Goldman Sachs: The Culture of Success
) allows philanthropists to voice their passion for large-scale charitable organizing and giving. The author’s subjects are an illustrious bunch, including Melinda Gates and hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones, and they champion such diverse causes as autism, poverty in Ethiopia, job training for the inner-city poor and need-based educational scholarships for college. Endlich keeps her treatment balanced by focusing on initial project failures and challenges as well as successes and brilliantly pulls together the common threads and motivations of these profiled philanthropists. The financiers, entrepreneurs and even one Olympian all agree that their extraordinary luck in life and ability to empathize factored heavily into their desire to give back in a big way to those in need; it is giving that adds a “narrative” to their lives. Given the excesses in corporate America and on Wall Street lately, this heartening book proves that even the most successful individuals in business can also devote themselves to something that “touched them so profoundly that they could not turn away.” (Dec.)
