Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World
by Bill Clinton
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Book Summary Information
Author: Bill ClintonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2007-09-04
ISBN: 1615568093
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Product features:
- Written by Clinton, Bill, about how we can work together
- to solve many of the world's problems.
Book Reviews of Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World
Book Review: Bill Clinton: a Late Comer to Giving
Summary: 1 Stars
About at week ago a book came out under the title Giving: How each of us can change the world. The author on the cover: Bill Clinton.
The book description starts off by telling us that Giving is an inspiring look at how each of us can change the world. First, it reveals the extraordinary and innovative efforts now being made by companies and organizations--and by individuals--to solve problems and save lives both "down the street and around the world." Then it urges us to seek out what each of us, "regardless of income, available time, age, and skills," can do to help, to give people a chance to live out their dreams.
And the description continues to emphasize that "Bill Clinton shares his own experiences" and those of other givers, representing a global flood tide of nongovernmental, nonprofit activity. These remarkable stories demonstrate that gifts of time, skills, things, and ideas are as important and effective as contributions of money. From Bill and Melinda Gates to a six-year-old California girl named McKenzie Steiner, who organized and supervised drives to clean up the beach in her community, Clinton introduces us to both well-known and unknown heroes of giving.
Question is how much of this is new? Did anyone not know about Bill Gates and Melinda Gates Foundation, Warren Buffet, Agassi, Ophrah etc? Are those really the "great examples" of givers? So many people in this country have helped others, here or abroad, from early age on, offered their skills, time or part of their income to contribute to the poor, before they accumulated any wealth. It is not the stars of the media that are the biggest contributors, it is all the other "givers" that together have had more impact over many more years that should have been highlighted. After all if you first have to accumulate a few billions (or millions) before you start consider "giving", there is something fundamentally wrong with your understanding of the world we are living in.
Actually, Bill Clinton's book is one that anyone with a small research staff and a couple of excellent editors could have written. The content is a long laundry list of people, organizations and government programs that have been "giving" money, time, and/or skills; all of this data could easily have been assembled by some research assistants or even by any of you who know how productive one can become with Google. Granted it is all put together in an easy readable format but that does not leave out the possibility that a couple of excellent editors produced the bulk of it.
In between this jungle of often unrelated data -- e.g. Benjamin Franklin's organization of firefighting -- are the personal notes of Bill Clinton e.g. how his wife was much more geared to helping the poor while she was in college than he was; how Al Gore gave Bill weekly (for eight years) a lecture about the environment, the fight on climate control (and now he finally got it?), etc.
The biggest problem with Clinton's assertions especially about all "the millions of people that have been affected when he was in office", is that he confuses cause and effect! Just because some things happen on "a certain watch", it does not imply that they were necessary the effect of deliberate programs. In the literatue one distinguishes between program outputs, effects and impact; Bill Clinton should know this, since it was USAIDs who came up with "the logical framework" in the 70's.
In the chapter about Government's contributions in "Giving" there is no mention how poverty evolved during the eight years that Bill was in the office; nor are there any references to contributions made by international organizations such as the World Bank, W.H.O., UNICEF; nor does Bill write about the current administrations contributions to HIV/AIDS relative to his own foundations. Dr Paul Farmer's work in the field on this came long before Bill Clinton "discovered" it after an almost fatal heart attack .
Throwing big numbers around with little supporting evidence, mixed with a political agenda for promoting his wife-- in this book you can read what the big five policy challenges are for the next President of the US (p 187) -- turn this in a rather boring book that after a few pages you wish you can quickly resell, get your money back and spend it on what your heart tells you about giving rather than what Bill Clinton suggests, who clearly is a latecomer in "giving".
Summary of Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World
Here, from Bill Clinton, is a call to action. Giving is an inspiring look at how each of us can change the world. First, it reveals the extraordinary and innovative efforts now being made by companies and organizations?and by individuals?to solve problems and save lives both ?down the street and around the world.? Then it urges us to seek out what each of us, ?regardless of income, available time, age, and skills,? can do to help, to give people a chance to live out their dreams.Bill Clinton shares his own experiences and those of other givers, representing a global flood tide of nongovernmental, nonprofit activity. These remarkable stories demonstrate that gifts of time, skills, things, and ideas are as important and effective as contributions of money. From Bill and Melinda Gates to a six-year-old California girl named McKenzie Steiner, who organized and supervised drives to clean up the beach in her community, Clinton introduces us to both well-known and unknown heroes of giving. Among them:
Dr. Paul Farmer, who grew up living in the family bus in a trailer park, vowed to devote his life to giving high-quality medical care to the poor and has built innovative public health-care clinics first in Haiti and then in Rwanda;
a New York couple, in Africa for a wedding, who visited several schools in Zimbabwe and were appalled by the absence of textbooks and school supplies. They founded their own organization to gather and ship materials to thirty-five schools. After three years, the percentage of seventh-graders who pass reading tests increased from 5 percent to 60 percent;'
Oseola McCarty, who after seventy-five years of eking out a living by washing and ironing, gave $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi to endow a scholarship fund for African-American students;
Andre Agassi, who has created a college preparatory academy in the Las Vegas neighborhood with the city?s highest percentage of at-risk kids. ?Tennis was a stepping-stone for me,? says Agassi. ?Changing a child?s life is what I always wanted to do?;
Heifer International, which gave twelve goats to a Ugandan village. Within a year, Beatrice Biira?s mother had earned enough money selling goat?s milk to pay Beatrice?s school fees and eventually to send all her children to school?and, as required, to pass on a baby goat to another family, thus multiplying the impact of the gift.
Clinton writes about men and women who traded in their corporate careers, and the fulfillment they now experience through giving. He writes about energy-efficient practices, about progressive companies going green, about promoting fair wages and decent working conditions around the world. He shows us how one of the most important ways of giving can be an effort to change, improve, or protect a government policy. He outlines what we as individuals can do, the steps we can take, how much we should consider giving, and why our giving is so important.
Bill Clinton?s own actions in his post-presidential years have had an enormous impact on the lives of millions. Through his foundation and his work in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, he has become an international spokesperson and model for the power of giving.
?We all have the capacity to do great things,? President Clinton says. ?My hope is that the people and stories in this book will lift spirits, touch hearts, and demonstrate that citizen activism and service can be a powerful agent of change in the world.?
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