The Idealist

April 29, 2013
Vanity Fair contributing editor Munk (Fools Rush In: Jerry Levin, Steve Case, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner) spent six years chronicling the Millennium Villages Project, the pet project that lauded economist Sachs (The End of Poverty) launched in 2006. The project’s goal was an audacious attempt to prove Sachs’s well-intentioned, but ultimately naïve theories about ending extreme poverty in Africa by focusing on a handful of carefully selected villages with the expectation that their halo effect would spread throughout the country. Munk artfully observes how Sachs’s infectious enthusiasm and optimism bring attention (and funding, including $120 million from George Soros) to the fledgling organization at home and abroad. Sachs ably illustrates how tactics like lacing mosquito nets with insecticides to fight malaria can make significant headway in achieving a larger goal of helping communities improve their circumstances and chances for development.” It’s a noble effort, but Sachs and his compatriots soon find that they wildly underestimated the difficulty of distributing those crucial nets, the impact of drought, as well as the learned helplessness of the recipients. All of these factors contribute to a less-than-ideal outcome. Students of economic policy and altruistic do-gooders alike will find Munk’s work to be a measured, immersive study of a remarkable but all-too-human man who let his vision get the best of him. Agent: Elyse Cheney, Elyse Cheney Literary Associates.

July 1, 2013
A journalist's probing account of renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs' Utopian experiment in ending global poverty. In 2005, Sachs, a "guru" to celebrity activists like Bono and Angelina Jolie, published a best-selling book, The End of Poverty, which claimed that poverty could be eliminated by 2025. His proposal was simple. Developed nations and private donors would pool together massive amounts of foreign aid to invest in forms of self-help that included fertilizer and high-yield grain to improve agricultural output and mosquito nets to prevent malaria. Starting in 2006, Vanity Fair contributor Munk (Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner, 2004) followed Sachs on his quixotic quest. She traveled with him on several occasions to Africa, where she watched as he and his team of development experts worked on the Millennium Villages Project, a five-year experiment designed to improve the economic and social well-being of 12 sub-Saharan villages. Sachs' success with the first Millennium Village in rural Kenya gave him the validation he needed to approach philanthropists like billionaire George Soros and ask for the funds he needed to implement his larger project. However, Sachs underestimated the difficulties he would encounter. Drought, political violence, aging infrastructure, traditional cultural values and resistance to change all undermined the goals of the project--as did the presence of other forms of foreign aid. In some areas, U.N. assistance programs fostered a dependency on outside sources that served as a deterrent to self-empowerment and created what one of Sachs' colleagues called "refugee syndrome." Munk is most effective in her depiction of the dangers inherent in imposing theories on the complex and ever-changing lives of real human beings. Radical new ideas are necessary to facilitate change, but no matter how brilliant, they will always and invariably have their limits. Trenchant and thought-provoking.

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July 1, 2013
Jeffrey Sachs is a rock-star economist and advisor to leaders with struggling economies from Bolivia to Poland to Russia. He switched from hard-edged economist to humanitarian when he undertook to end world poverty, writing The End of Poverty (2005) and launching the Millennium Villages Project in 2006. It was a daring five-year project, financed by George Soros and like-minded donors, seeking answers to end poverty that were sustainable and transferable. Munk spent six years traveling with Sachs between African villages and donors' meetings, living among villagers and project managers to get a sense of the progress of Sachs' grand experiment. She chronicles efforts to reduce malaria and develop sustainable farming projects as well as head-on clashes with development officials and worries about encouraging dependency even as the project pushed for more market-oriented programs. Her accounts of the experiences of programs in Somalia and Uganda highlight the ebb and flow of enthusiasm, disappointment, resentment, and frustration among camel herders, farmers, and villagers as they struggled to survive while theories on poverty relief confronted harsh realities.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)