Book bits

GIVING: How Each of Us Can Change The World

Author: Bill Clinton

Former US President Bill Clinton has stitched together a book imbued with a generous spirit, meant to help needy women, men, and children across the nation and around the world.

It reads more like a catalog than a narrative; it mentions hundreds of charitably minded individuals, private foundations, nongovernment organizations, and government agencies. It contains dollops of self-aggrandizement in the first person; nobody has ever honored Clinton for a small ego. It might never have become a book if a lesser personage had turned in a similar manuscript.

Still, the potential of Giving to do good ought to minimize the carping by reviewers like myself. The jacket even notes that "a portion of President Clinton's proceeds from this book will be donated to charities and nonprofits that are doing their part to change the world."

After an overview chapter titled "The Explosion of Private Citizens Doing Public Good," Clinton organizes the book by category of contribution: giving money, giving time, giving material goods, giving skills such as accounting or carpentry, giving reconciliation to beset groups within a divided (sometimes genocidal) society, offering gifts that keep on giving (such as cows to poor rural residents), replicating programs (such as HIV/AIDS prevention programs) in other locales once they have demonstrated success, supporting good ideas such as environmental education for students, working to make public-good projects like wind energy and solar energy more practical, and supporting government agencies that truly help the needy.

The final chapter deals with the interesting bifurcated question, "How Much Should You Give and Why?" No one answer fits all readers, but Clinton grapples with useful answers to the best of his ability. A resources section at the back of the text provides websites and reference books galore.

Clinton quotes Martin Luther King Jr., who said before his assassination, "Everyone can be great because everyone can serve." Clinton hopes that a large percentage of the book's readers will achieve their own brands of greatness. The book is more practical than inspirational. Still, it might nudge some readers toward the mind-set that Clinton wants them to adopt.

– By Steve Weinberg

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