An eye-opening look at the use of tax-subsidized money by private philanthropy.
How the Gates Foundation acts “a great deal more like Microsoft than Mother Theresa” and why that matters.
As investigative journalist Schwab demonstrates in his debut book, Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates has been mythologized as the ultimate good guy, albeit often by the very media and political outlets he has funded through his philanthropic ventures. However, the author argues convincingly that “the Gates Foundation is a nonprofit, tax-privileged charity that is acting like a private equity investor, venture capital fund, or a pharmaceutical company.” For example, the foundation “has positioned itself to see the confidential business information of competing companies” and asks charitable partners to give it licensing claims to their technology. Furthermore, Schwab notes, Gates poured his greatest sums into the foundation during two periods when he most needed positive publicity: during the investigations into Microsoft as a possible monopoly, and a spell when Gates’ personal life was in the spotlight. The author is most troubled by the lack of transparency in the U.S. involving not just Gates, but also the increasing number of billionaires with private foundations. These organizations are not held to the same transparency standards as public companies, government agencies, or political actors. This is true even though tax breaks mean that some 50% of every dollar spent by foundations like Gates’ is “public money.” Schwab sends a clear message to legislators that they must begin regulating the foundations they have left comparatively unexamined since the 1960s. “Our democracy is only as strong as we allow it to be and only as accountable as we force it to be,” he writes. Though the author extends his reach beyond Gates, he always returns to him, as “it would be difficult to name a more powerful, less scrutinized political actor than the Gates Foundation.”
An eye-opening look at the use of tax-subsidized money by private philanthropy.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781250850096
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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