The Moment of Lift

November 1, 2018

Cochair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates here explains why her philanthropy focuses on women, making the connection between women's empowerment and the health of societies. That means promoting family planning, job opportunities, paid family leave, and the equitable division of household labor and booting out gender bias in all its forms. Huge publicity.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 25, 2019
Philanthropist, mother of three, and wife of one of the world’s richest men, Gates delivers a thoughtful and empathetic treatise that demonstrates how empowering women can change the world and lift families from poverty. Gates’s career as a human rights advocate began with family planning issues, that is, a women’s right to choose when to get pregnant—an unusual stance, she notes, for a longtime practicing Catholic. With each chapter, Gates addresses other thorny issues that hold women down: unreliable maternal and newborn healthcare (“Forty million women a year give birth without assistance”), lack of access to education (both in the U.S. and abroad) and lack of access to contraception, child marriage, sex work, and female genital mutilation. Gates writes movingly of other change makers globally, including investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett (who, with Bill Gates founded the Giving Pledge organization), Pakistani education-activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Malala Yousafzai, and Dutch human rights activist Mabel van Oranje, who fights to end child marriage—and of the pride she feels in instilling these values in her children, who have volunteered in organizations throughout Africa. Part memoir, part call to action, Gates’s compassionate narrative underscores her determination to leave a positive mark on this world. She inspires and emboldens in this eloquently argued work.

Starred review from March 1, 2019
What does it mean to be a philanthropist? For Gates, it means also becoming an activist, albeit a reluctant one. Faced with the realization that the fundamental rights of women?from health care and reproductive wellness to gender parity, educational opportunities, and economic advancement?were being ignored, curtailed, or purposely ended, Gates knew that she could put her considerable wealth, connections, and privilege to work for those in peril. As cochair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, she did more than just write the checks. She spoke up and spoke out, and she backed her arguments with the facts that came from immersing herself in cultures where she could observe and experience firsthand the changes that empowering women can bring. Gates met with abuse victims in the Philippines and sex-trade workers in India, lived with a Maasai family in Tanzania, and learned about the horrors of child marriage in Ethiopia. Hers is an ecumenical message made personal by the unexpectedly candid revelations she shares about her own life and marriage, motherhood and career. At a time when beneficial globalization is being threatened by nationalism, and women's rights are in danger of being rolled back to nineteenth-century norms, Gates offers urgent reminders of why it's necessary to help women everywhere achieve their full potential.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)