Highly useful guidelines to finding the perfect charity worthy of your money.
How to determine which charities are the best to support.
For those with the money and the incentive to do so, donating to charity is common practice. But how do you know if your money is really going to help those most in need? MacAskill (Philosophy/Oxford Univ.), a founder of the “effective altruism movement,” offers readers several parameters they can use to examine the effectiveness of their chosen charity so they can be assured that their “purchase” is doing the most good. By looking at qualitative data such as the overall number of people who will be aided, whether this is the most effective use of the money, and whether this is an area that otherwise might be neglected, the author assures readers that they can donate in a significant way. He thoroughly analyzes each condition he outlines and uses graphics and mathematical formulas to walk readers through examples, comparing existing charities to show that those with some of the largest names in the charity business might not be the most effective. He offers lists of the top charities, in his opinion, along with brief explanations of his findings, and he studies the pros and cons of controversial topics such as sweatshops and child labor in developing countries. MacAskill also explains why it is important to remove the emotional aspect of giving since it may not be the best use of your contribution. (If you know someone with cancer, you’re apt to donate to a cancer society as opposed to, say, buying mosquito netting to help prevent malaria.) There are thousands of charities in the world, most of which are attempting to do good for people. The author shows readers how to take any of these charities and assess them against his structure so they can make informed decisions on their charitable contributions.
Highly useful guidelines to finding the perfect charity worthy of your money.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-592-40910-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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