The Idealist Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty

by Munk, Nina

• ISBN13: 9780767929424
• ISBN10: 076792942X
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2014-10-07
• Publisher: Anchor

Summary

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
Bloomberg • Forbes • The Spectator

Recipient of Foreign Policy's 2013 Albie Award


In 2006, Jeffrey Sachs—celebrated economist, special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, and author of the influential bestseller The End of Poverty— launched the Millennium Villages Project, a daring, $120-million experiment designed to test his theories about ending poverty. For six years, Nina Munk shadowed Sachs on his trips to Africa, listened in on conversations with heads-of-state and humanitarian organizations, and immersed herself in the lives of people in two remote African villages.  Munk came to understand the real-life issues that challenge Sachs’s formula for ending global poverty. The Idealist is the profound and moving story of what happens when the abstract theories of a brilliant, driven man meet the realities of human life.

Author Biography

Nina Munk, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is a journalist and the author of Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner. She was previously a senior writer at Fortune, and before that a senior editor at Forbes. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Fortune, and the New York Times. She lives in New York.