Is Jo Nesbo the world’s best crime novelist?

A review of The Leopard: A Harry Hole Novel, by Jo Nesbo

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

If Jo Nesbo isn’t the world’s best crime novelist, he’s certainly making a play for the top of the list. For what it’s worth, anyway, I haven’t read anyone better at the game. The Leopard, one of the later entries among the ten detective novels in Nesbo’s Harry Hole series, portrays the conflicted Norwegian homicide cop in the depth of his complexity, pursuing a fiendish serial killer from Norway to the Congo.

The Leopard opens in Hong Kong, where Harry has fled to drown himself in alcohol and heroin following his resignation from the Norwegian police. A serial killer he captured too late had upended his life by separating Harry from the woman he loves. However, a clever young detective from Oslo manages to track him down and persuade him to return with her because he is urgently needed to take on a new high-profile case, the murder of a member of the Norwegian Parliament. Harry consents only because the young detective tells him that his father is seriously ill and confined to a hospital.

The novel functions well on three levels: a suspenseful story of how Harry and his colleagues pursue a brilliant serial killer, uncovering surprises all along the way; an insightful character study of a man wrestling with more than his share of demons as he suffers through the illness and eventual death of his father; and a highly perceptive tale of internal politics within the Norwegian police, focusing on the high-stakes rivalry between two police units that the Ministry of Justice threatens to merge, effectively eliminating Harry’s department and ending his career. Somehow, Nesbo packs all this into a novel of moderate length, managing as well to dip into the Congolese civil wars that center on the trade in coltan (used in cellphones) and touch on the brutal colonial history of the Congo. The Leopard is extraordinarily rich in fascinating detail.

For all that he writes such superb detective novels, Jo Nesbo is also a prominent rock musician and an author of children’s books. (To date, he has written a total of 17 books.) Oh, and he earned a degree from the Norwegian School of Economics, worked as a stockbroker, and was also a top-notch soccer player until he broke his ankle.

Heads up: My new book will be in stores Sept. 9

My co-author, Paul Polak, and I are now putting the final touches on the manuscript, and it’s got months of design and production ahead. But the new book will be published this year by Berrett-Koehler, the San Francisco firm that brought out an earlier book of mine, Values-Driven Business: How to Change the World, Make Money, and Have Fun (co-authored with Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s fame). The official publication date for the new book is Sept. 9.

Its title is The Business Solution to Poverty: Designing Products and Services for Three Billion New Customers.

It’s premature to tell you much about the book, but I thought you might like to know a little about my co-author, Dr. Paul Polak.

Paul Polak is widely regarded as the father of market-centered approaches to development. He started harnessing the energy of the marketplace 30 years ago when IDE, the organization he founded, sold one-and-a-half million treadle pumps to small farmers in Bangladesh, increasing their net income by more than $150 million a year. Over the past 30 years, he has had long conversations with more than 3,000 small farmers who live on less than $1 a day and walked with them through their fields. IDE has now enabled 20 million of the world’s poorest people to move out of poverty by selling them radically affordable irrigation tools made available through thousands of small village manufacturers, dealers, and well drillers, and opening smallholder access to markets where they could sell their crops at a profit.

Paul’s earlier book, Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail, has been widely used as a basic text on practical solutions to rural poverty. He is the founder and CEO of Windhorse International and co-founder and board chairman of Spring Health India, for-profit companies with the mission of bringing safe drinking water to 100 million poor rural customers in the world. Paul is the prime mover for creating and implementing the four social impact multinationals in this book, each designed to transform the lives of 100 million $2/day customers and generate annual sales of $10 billion.

Prior to founding Windhorse, in 2008 Paul established D-Rev, a nonprofit that seeks “to create a design revolution by enlisting the best designers in the world to develop products and ideas that will benefit the 90 percent of the people on earth who are poor, in order to help them earn their way out of poverty. Paul’s vision inspired Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt travelling exhibit, “Design for the Other 90 percent.” He was named by The Atlantic as one of the world’s 27 “Brave Thinkers” along with Steve Jobs and Barack Obama. He has also received the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award and the Scientific American “Top 50” award for agricultural policy.

Paul graduated from medical school in 1958, worked for 23 years as a psychiatrist, creating innovative models of community treatment, and at various points in his career also worked as a farmer and a hands-on investor in oil and gas, real estate, and equipment leasing. He and his wife Agnes have been happily married for 53 years, and have three grown daughters. At the age of 79, he still puts in an 80-hour work week and loves what he does.

The 12 best nonfiction books I’ve read in 2012

This was going to be a list of 10 books, but I couldn’t resist adding another two. It’s been a great year for nonfiction.

1. Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace, by Peter Janney

Review to be posted Dec. 10. Look for it!

2. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander

A penetrating analysis of the racist underpinnings of the U.S. justice system, the result of the ill-conceived “war on drugs” and deep-seated racial fears that has led to the mass incarceration of people of color.

3. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt

This exceptionally brilliant book is the story of a long-lost poem and of the man who rediscovered it more than a thousand years later, helping to trigger an upheaval in medieval European thinking that came to be known as the Renaissance. The Swerve details the staggering impact of the poem, a 7,400-line masterpiece that laid out in minute detail the revolutionary worldview of a Greek philosopher whose greatest influence was felt two millennia after his death.

4. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann

Forget just about everything you learned in school about the peoples who lived in the Western Hemisphere before 1492 — and about the land, too. It turns out that yesterday’s historians, anthropologists, paleontologists, and ecologists got it pretty much all wrong. In this revised edition of a 2006 bestseller, we learn that the Americas before Columbus were far more heavily populated, the leading civilizations far more sophisticated, and their origins far further back in time than earlier generations of scholars had suspected.

5. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo

An enthralling and deeply disturbing book that reads like a novel, this is a three-year study of life in a small Indian slum nestled between the new Mumbai International Airport and the five-star hotels clustered nearby. A quest to understand poverty and the ways people find to transcend it.

6. The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, by Robert D. Kaplan

Through a geopolitical lens, Planet Earth, and the machinations and foibles of earthly leaders, look a lot different than they do in most history books. Stand a few feet away from a globe and squint: if the globe is properly positioned, what you’ll see is one huge, three-tentacled landmass (Asia-Africa-Europe); a second, much smaller one that consists of two parts joined by a narrow connector (North and South America); and several even smaller bits of land scattered about on the periphery (Australia, Greenland, Japan, Indonesia). That’s the world as Robert D. Kaplan sees it in this illuminating study of world history and current events as influenced by geography.

7. The Self-Made Myth, and the Truth About How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed, by Brian Miller and Mike Lapham

A thoughtful and impeccably reasoned new book that goes straight to the heart of the conservative argument favoring limited government and coddling the rich. Rather than quibble about this program or that issue, or fasten on the transparently shoddy logic of a Republican budget that promises to reduce the federal deficit when in fact it will surely increase it, Miller and Lapham’s argument strikes at the fundamental values and assumptions underlying today’s conservatism: the myth rooted in the writing of novelist Ayn Rand of the superhuman “job creator.”

8. Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, by Arthur Herman

Focuses on the role that America’s business community, and especially Big Business, played in the monumental effort that resulted in the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan just months apart in 1945.  Two extraordinary men — William S. Knudsen and Henry Kaiser — are the stars of this story, business impresarios who marshaled the stupendous numbers of men and women and the unprecedented mountains of raw materials that supplied the U.S. and its Allies with the weapons of war.

9. Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the World’s Greatest Business Case for Compassion, by Pavithra Mehta and Suchitra Shenoy

The truly truly astonishing story — one with profound implications for development throughout the Global South — of how a retired Indian eye surgeon founded a nonprofit eye hospital in a southern Indian city in 1976 that is today “the largest and most productive blindness-prevention organization on the planet.” Equally important, Aravind also serves as a global resource center for opthalmology, training one out of every seven Indian eye doctors, consulting on management and technical issues with eye hospitals in 69 countries, and operating a state-of-the-art research center.

10. Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, by Ben McIntyre

The mind-boggling story of six European double agents who were “turned” or recruited by the British and played roles as large as those of any American general in the success of the Normandy invasion that opened up the Western Front and the path to Allied victory.

11. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t, by Nate Silver

As ambitious as it is digestible, and written in an easy, conversational style, The Signal and the Noise explores the ins and outs of predicting outcomes not just in politics, poker, and sports as well as the stock market, the economy, the 2008 financial meltdown, weather forecasting, earthquakes, epidemic disease, chess, climate change, and terrorism.

12. Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, by David Quammen

A fascinating account grounded in scientific research of a class of diseases known as “zoonoses,” that is, animal in origin, that encompasses AIDS, Ebola, Marburg, SARS, H5N1 — and many others of of the world’s scariest diseases. The book recaptures the drama in the lives of the research scientists, physicians, veterinarians, and others who are on the front lines of humanity’s defense against disease.

Where do all those “emerging diseases” emerge from?

A review of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, by David Quammen

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

AIDS, Ebola, Marburg, SARS, H5N1 — every one of the world’s scariest diseases is a “zoonosis,” that is, a virus harbored by animals and transmitted to humans, often by other animals, in a complex minuet that often stretches out into decades.

AIDS, for example. According to the latest research, reported by David Quammen in Spillover, Patient Zero was not that French-Canadian flight attendant you may have read about who went amok in the 1970s but a hunter in Southeast Cameroon around 1908 who killed a chimpanzee and somehow unwittingly allowed the animal’s blood to seep into his own circulatory system, either through a cut or by eating his prey’s raw flesh. This is the phenomenon that epidemiologists call “spillover.” At that point, a particularly virulent form of a recently emergent simian virus found a friendly and familiar environment in the hunter’s blood and flourished, becoming what we know today as HIV-1 (the more lethal form of the virus that causes AIDS). Later, the hunter passed along the virus to one or more women through sexual contact, and the disease slowly spread, both by sex and by transmission through reused needles, undetected as anything out of the ordinary, from Cameroon into what is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, and other sub-Saharan countries, and thence by happenstance to Haiti. It was a Haitian harboring HIV-1 who probably passed it along to that notorious Canadian flight attendant, setting off the epidemic among gay men in North America.

In Spillover, Quammen tells tales like these in fascinating detail, relating the stories of the often-heroic scientists, physicians, and veterinarians who worked directly with deadly diseases, occasionally at the cost of their own lives. Quammen spent years writing this book. He appears to have read all the relevant scientific literature, attended specialized scientific conferences, and spent long hours tracking down and speaking face-to-face with the people who discovered these diseases, isolated the viruses, first treated the symptoms, and labored for thankless years on end in laboratories around the world to help humanity avert the next pandemic.

You may have read Richard Preston’s best-selling 2001 treatment of the emergence of Ebola in The Hot Zone. If not, I can tell you that I vividly recall the book because it was so dramatic, and so terrifying. No doubt I had nightmares about contracting Ebola. But it turns out, according to Quammen and to the eminent scientists he interviewed, that Preston’s account was sensationalized and highly inaccurate in essential details. For example, he described tears of blood, massive hemorrhages, and melted internal organs, none of which has any basis in fact.

However, Spillover, in its own way, is no less frightening. Quammen advances the popular theory that what appears to be the accelerating emergence of dangerous new pathogens became inevitable as a result of the enormous population growth of homo sapiens — because humanity has increasingly encroached on animal habitat and come into intimate contact with animals as never before. In discussions with noted biologists, he explores the concept of “breakout,” the explosive growth frequently seen in some animal species that shortly leads to sudden, catastrophic — through disease. He intimates that, with AIDS — or, all too possibly, with the next pandemic — humankind may experience something similar. Despite all the horrific details about AIDS, Ebola, Marburg, and the like, these are the book’s scariest passages.

David Quammen writes about science, nature, and travel — a total of 10 nonfiction books and five novels to date. A former Rhodes Scholar, he was educated at Yale and Oxford.

A fresh and thought-provoking view of world politics and current events

A review of The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, by Robert D. Kaplan

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Geopolitics — the subject of this fascinating book — has literally been on my mind  almost throughout my life.

I had recently turned three when the Allies invaded Normandy, beginning the long, last phase of World War II in Europe. I have no active memory of the invasion, but I’ve been told that I learned to read by studying the news about the event and its aftermath. My father read the newspaper at dinner, and I sat opposite him, leaning over the table so I could see the headlines — upside down — and ask him to tell me what the words meant. I loved the maps, too, those sketches of Europe and the Pacific with broad arrows pointing this way and that to indicate the movements of troops and ships at sea. Geography was long my favorite subject in school, and it’s probably not a stretch to think that my life-long fascination with the world outside the USA began with that experience.

Through a geopolitical lens, Planet Earth, and the machinations and foibles of earthly leaders, look a lot different than they do in most history books. Stand a few feet away from a globe and squint: if the globe is properly positioned, what you’ll see is one huge, three-tentacled landmass (Asia-Africa-Europe); a second, much smaller one that consists of two parts joined by a narrow connector (North and South America); and several even smaller bits of land scattered about on the periphery (Australia, Greenland, Japan, Indonesia). That’s the world as the Joint Chiefs of Staff must view it. Has to view it.

Understanding the globe from that perspective, current events become a lot easier to understand. Take, for example, the object of American preoccupation today: the Middle East.

The true geopolitical center of the Earth lies in the Middle East, a region consisting essentially of three sections: the Iranian Plateau, running from present-day Iraq to Afghanistan and dominated by a resurgent Iran, the latest incarnation of the Persian Empire; the Anatolian landbridge (Turkey) that connects Asia and Europe, successor to the Eastern Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires; and the oil- and natural-gas-rich Arabian Peninsula, unsteadily governed by the extended Saud family and a congeries of coastal emirates. Nestled between them and extending westward along the North African Maghreb is a long line of generally flat, low-lying states that are experiencing various degrees of instability, only a handful of which have a solid historical and demographic basis for nationhood (Tunisia, Egypt, Israel). Given the geography of this region, its perennial instability is no surprise. Constant turmoil is practically guaranteed, with the dominating Iranian and Turkish highlands above, and virtually flat, featureless plains below, divided among mostly weak states with arbitrary borders inherited from British and French colonial masters. As Kaplan notes, “the supreme fact of twenty-first -century world politics is that the most geographically central area of the dry-land earth is also the most unstable.”

Of all the states in the Greater Middle East, the strongest of all, and most likely to dominate at some point in the decades ahead, is Iran, with a proud history (“Iran was the ancient world’s first superpower.”), a population of 75 million, a literacy rate of 80%, an industrial base, and an extensive network of universities. Iran is situated in an enviable position, straddling the region’s two principal oil-production areas (the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf), not to mention its own abundant hydrocarbon reserves. Is it any wonder, then, why Iran captures headlines with such frequency?

In this fashion, geopolitics yields important insight about how the world works. To cite another example, Kaplan asks “Why is China ultimately more important than Brazil? Because of geographical location: even supposing the same level of economic growth as China and a population of equal size, Brazil does not command the main sea lines of communication connecting oceans and continents as China does; nor does it mainly lie in the temperate zone like China, with a more disease-free and invigorating climate. China fronts the Western Pacific and has depth on land reaching to oil- and natural-gas-rich Central Asia. Brazil offers less of a comparative advantage. It lies isolated in South America, geographically removed from other landmasses.”

The Revenge of Geography is crammed with thought-provoking analysis — about the influence of geography on European history, about the role of megacities in our future, about changing demographic patterns, about the impact of latitude on the fate of nations. Oh, and do you remember Sacha Baron Cohen’s satirical treatment of Kazakhstan? Kaplan informs us that “Kazakhstan is truly becoming an independent power in its own right” (and proves it). Who knew?

A word of warning, though: unless you’re familiar with both world history and ancient history, you may find The Revenge of Geography to be tough sledding through the innumerable mentions of long-lost empires and forgotten kings. Kaplan grounds his analysis not just in geography but also in history, and his knowledge of both clearly runs deep.

Kaplan begins wrapping up his book with a troubling discussion about recent U.S. foreign and military policy: “while the United States was deeply focused on Afghanistan and other parts of the Greater Middle East, a massive state failure was developing right on America’s southern border, with far more profound implications for the near and distant future of America, its society, and American power than anything occurring half a world away. What have we achieved in the Middle East with all of our interventions since the 1980s? . . . Why not fix Mexico instead?”

“America faces three primary geopolitical dilemmas,” Kaplan concludes. “[A] chaotic Eurasian heartland in the Middle East, a rising and assertive Chinese superpower, and a state in deep trouble in Mexico. And the challenges we face with China and Mexico are most efficiently dealt with by wariness of further military involvement in the Middle East. This is the only way that American power can sustain itself for the decades to come.”

A technology maven’s vision of humanity’s bright future

A review of Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Peter Diamandis envisions a world in which humanity triumphs against all its challenges, from climate change, overpopulation, and poverty to the planetary deficits in energy and water.

This is not science fiction. It’s an eye-opening survey of what one celebrated technology visionary perceives as a feasible future for our species.

As Diamandis writes, “Abundance is a tale of good news. At its core, this book examines the hard facts, the science and engineering, the social trends and economic forces that are rapidly transforming our world. . . The point is this: When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they’re mainly inaccessible. Yet the threat of scarcity still dominates our worldview.”

Diamandis is unusually well qualified to write this book. He is a Harvard-trained physician and an aeronautical engineer with a master’s degree from MIT. Ever since the age of 8, he has been preoccupied with space exploration. He has founded or co-founded a half-dozen businesses and organizations involved in that field and is widely credited with being the seminal figure in jump-starting the private space exploration business with the $10 million Ansari X Prize that led to the flight of SpaceShipOne.

In Abundance, co-written with Steven Kotler and published February 2012, Diamandis veers far from the course he set in space, settling down to earth to explore how humankind can leverage emerging technologies to confront its most pressing problems. Though Diamandis’ focus is squarely on the exponential growth in speed, capability, and spread of information processing technologies, he is not a gadget freak. He recognizes the social and political context in which technology is brought to light, although he may downplay the ferocity of humanity’s innate resistance to change. He writes about “game-changing” technologies, such as the “Lab-on-a-Chip . . . a portable, cell-phone-sized device [that] will allow doctors, nurses, and even patients themselves to take a sample of bodily fluid (such as urine, sputum, or a single drop of blood) and run dozens, if not hundreds, of diagnostics on the spot and in a manner of minutes.” He cites other potential breakthrough technologies now being developed by such luminaries as inventor Dean Kamen and biogeneticist Craig Venter.

For anyone but a Luddite, Abundance is exciting to read. Diamandis clearly believes that the technological advances he writes about hold promise of a much brighter future for humanity despite the anticipated growth in the world’s population to nine billion by 2050. (He even points to growing “in vitro” meat as one solution to the fast-rising demand for protein by ever more prosperous people.) For a science fiction fan such as myself, it’s difficult not to get starry-eyed.

However, the flaw in his line of reasoning is that, no matter how promising these new devices and processes might be, it’s not practical to assume that they’ll be quickly adopted around the world. That Lab-on-a-Chip sound wonderful? Great! But how many years will it take to put one billion copies of that device into the hands of the nurses running rural health clinics in Western Kenya and Uttar Pradesh and everywhere else in our wide, wide world? And how much will that cost? And will the spread of the device be rapid enough to prevent what other futurists see as the inevitable pandemics of new communicable diseases? Similar questions arise about nearly every one of the marvelous inventions cited in Abundance.

Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation and cofounder of Singularity University, laid out his vision of abundance in earth’s future in a brilliant TED2012 talk. The themes he introduced onstage at TED are explored in depth in this book.

To give some sense of the exalted circles in which Diamandis travels, here are some of the trustees of the X Prize Foundation: Larry Page, Elon Musk, James Cameron, Dean Kamen, Ratan Tata, Ray Kurzweil, Arianna Huffington, and Craig Venter, every one of whom would figure in anyone’s list of the brightest and most innovative thinkers and doers in the world.

The sorry record of microcredit laid bare by an industry veteran

A review of Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic: How Microlending Lost Its Way and Betrayed the Poor, by Hugh Sinclair

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

“Some microfinance is extremely beneficial to the poor, but it is not the miracle cure that its publicists would have you believe. Microfinance has been hijacked by profiteers, and we need to reclaim it for the poor. The problem is not with a few rogue operators, alas, but with systemic flaws that permeate the sector.”

Thus does Hugh Sinclair lay out the thesis he pursues in Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic. If you skip over this statement in the opening pages of the book, you could easily conclude that Sinclair can see no good at all in the $70 billion industry that has grown up under the impetus of Muhammad Yunus’ 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. After all, Sinclair writes — at least twice — that he wouldn’t invest a single dollar in microfinance today. Nonetheless, he insists that the “debate is not whether microfinance works, but how the inherent conflicts of interest can be managed.”

The systemic flaws Sinclair perceives are eye-opening:

• A majority of the money loaned to poor people goes not to help them launch or sustain microbusinesses to supplement family income but rather for current consumption, sometimes to buy food during a time when there’s not enough money coming in, sometimes just to buy TV sets.”Estimates for consumption loans range from 50 percent to 90 percent of all microfinance loans,” depending on the study. As Sinclair points out, citing numerous sources, the proportion of entrepreneurs among the poor is no bigger than it is among the rich. It’s naive of us to expect otherwise.
• The interest rates charged for microloans are, far too often, prohibitively high. Muhammad Yunus’ benchmark — 10 to 15 percent above the cost of money — is rarely observed. Though there are indeed many, mostly small, nonprofit MFIs (Microfinance Institutions, generally microloan lenders) that charge no more than 25 or 30 percent, the bigger institutions, and most of the for-profit banks in the industry, typically charge far more. In one notorious case, the effective interest rate runs as high as 195 percent, but there are many other instances in which the rate exceeds 100 percent.
• The amounts of money loaned by MFIs are far too small to permit businesses to grow to a size where they may employ workers outside the family. In fact, to the extent that businesses remain family-run, they frequently employ even the youngest children, sometimes withdrawn from school to work in the business. However, there’s another side to this question, as Sinclair reveals in an exchange with one businesswoman: “[W]e asked her about her future plans for the business, and whether she thought it could be built up further and be a useful business for her children to take over. ‘You misunderstand me. I don’t do this job because I like it or want to grow it into a big business. I do it so my children will never have to do work like this.'”
• In countries where local laws and a lack of government oversight give free rein to the MFIs, competition run wild among them has sometimes led to credit crises. In India’s Andhra Pradesh state, for example, “There were more microloans than poor people.” And in Nicaragua “total lending by MFIs was estimated at $420 million in 2008, in a country of about 5.5 million, not all of whom were poor (and MFIs generally don’t lend to children).” Microloan customers frequently borrowed from several of the country’s 19 MFIs — the nationwide average was four — often to be able to pay back loans to other MFIs. “One particularly ambitious client in Jalapa had managed to rack up $600,000 in micro-loans.” As Sinclair disclosed in a talk he gave in Berkeley a few weeks ago, Nicaragua was only the first of several countries where the microcredit bubble is likely to burst. Stay tuned, he said.
• The profit motive appears to have become the central preoccupation of the microfinance funds, which function like private equity funds, gathering together investment dollars and placing them in selected MFIs. Even some of the biggest and most prestigious of these funds — including the Grameen Foundation (USA), Calvert Foundation, Kiva.org, and BlueOrchard (the world’s largest) — have been tainted by longstanding investments in some of the most egregiously exploitive MFIs, brushing aside mountains of evidence that their investments were helping victimize poor people in Nigeria, Mexico, and other countries.

Despite all this, there is NO documented evidence that microfinance has achieved any reduction at all in the level of poverty. As a 2007 article in the Harvard Business Review stated, “In 1991, for example, Bangladesh ranked 136th on the UN Development Programme’s Human Development Index (a measure of societal well-being); 15 years later it ranked 137th.” And Sinclair writes, “In 2001, Nicaragua was the 106th poorest country in the world . . . Microfinance was almost unheard of in Nicaragua at this point, and there were no large microfinance funds throwing money around. By 2009, when the full Nicaraguan microfinance meltdown occurred, Nicaragua had slipped to 124th place.”

Hugh Sinclair is no cranky, slapdash journalist taking on a controversial subject for the sake of selling books. He is a ten-year veteran of the microfinance industry and has been involved as either an employee or a consultant in dozens of MFIs around the world and in several microfinance funds. He clearly knows whereof he writes, his citation of sources is extensive, and his publisher, Berrett-Koehler, is a highly respected source of books on business and current affairs.

Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic is an important book that should be must reading for anyone involved in international development.

Books that helped me understand the world

During the last several years — mostly after I bought my first Kindle — I’ve spent a great deal of time reading, roughly half of it fiction, the other half non. I’ve gotten through hundreds of books and have reviewed the last 200 or so in this blog. It feels like a good time to cast a backwards look and identify those books that remain vivid in my memory — books that helped me understand the way the world works. Though most of the fiction I’ve read has been simply enjoyable, a few have touched me. None, though, have really nestled deep into memory and changed the way I view life and the world. I learn mostly from nonfiction. Whatever that says about my character — so be it.

Here, then, are the 20 nonfiction books that have impressed me the most in recent years. They’re arranged in alphabetical order by the authors’ last names. Those I’ve reviewed are boldfaced and linked.

Alexander, Michelle, The New Jim Crow. A shocking survey of the consequences of America’s so-called War on Drugs and the racism in our justice system

Banerjee, Abhijit, and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. A rigorous and balanced view of both top-down and bottoms-up development policies in the light of field research

Clark, Gregory, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. History as I like it: painted in broad swaths across the millennia, rejecting the myth that the “West” was destined to rule the world

Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. A brilliantly original view of world history from a geographer’s perspective, ascribing variable levels of development primarily to environmental and geographical factors

Easterly, William, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. The case against foreign aid and top-down development, by a former World Bank economist

Elkington, John, and Pamela Hartigan, The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World. The liveliest and most insightful of several books on social entrepreneurs

Gladwell, Malcolm, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. The seminal book on understanding “six degrees of separation” and the way networks work

Harden, Blaine, Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West. A riveting tale of the North Korean gulag, spotlighting the reality of repression in the Kim family’s private kingdom

Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. One of the most troubling books I’ve ever read about the legacy of colonialism: the harrowing story of how the Belgian King destroyed the Congo and murdered millions of its people

Johnson, Chalmers, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. A scholar and former U.S. official demonstrates how the U.S. dominates the world through hundreds of military bases, undermining our nation’s reputation and robbing our society of the means to address pressing social problems

Larson, Erik, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin. An eye-opening account of U.S. official anti-Semitism in FDR’s Administration that shackled our Ambassador in Berlin who witnessed the outrageous acts unfolding in Nazi Germany

Mann, Charles C., 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. A revisionist view of Native American society in both North and South America, offering proof of huge populations and sophisticated civilizations in the present-day U.S. and in the Amazon Basin

Miller, Brian, and Mike Lapham, The Self-Made Myth: And the Truth about How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed. A clear-eyed look beyond the bounds of Right-Wing ideology at the immeasurable benefits and services every “self-made man” has received from U.S. society

Mukherjee, Siddhartha, The Emperor of All Maladies. An oncologist’s brilliant history of cancer and of the medical profession’s slowly developing success in treating it

Polak, Paul, Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail. How a former psychiatrist, laboring face-to-face with $1-a-day farmers in some of the world’s poorest countries, helped 17 million families escape from poverty

Priest, Dana, and William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State. A Pulitzer-Award-winning Washington Post reporter and her researcher rip the cover from the enormous intelligence establishment built after 9-11

Skloot, Rebecca, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. A science reporter’s captivating ten-year search to understand the consequences of a medical crime committed in an overtly racist era before the rise of medical ethics

Ward, Vicky, The Devil’s Casino: Friendship, Betrayal, and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers. The most intimate and candid account of how Wall Street played the central role in launching the Great Recession

Wrong, Michela, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower. A vivid account by a Financial Times reporter of how corruption holds sway even in one of Africa’s most developed economies 

Must reading about global poverty and the contrasting approaches to ending it

A review of Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Public debate about the way to combat global poverty has ricocheted between two extremes. One was summed up in 2005 in The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia economist who spearheaded the UN Millennium Development Goals. The other was laid out by former World Bank economist William Easterly the following year in The White Man’s Burden. Sachs advocates massive government-to-government foreign aid. Easterly deplores foreign aid, convinced that it does more harm than good.

In Poor Economics, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo seek a path between these two extremes, emphasizing the Randomized Controlled Studies they and their colleagues had conducted to ascertain what works and what doesn’t. (As of 2010, they had completed more than 240 studies in forty countries around the world.)They characterize Easterly’s approach as demand-driven, since he believes that poor people must seek their own solutions — a conservative, free-market attitude. By contrast, Sachs’ approach is supply-driven, reflecting Sachs’ conviction that a government must provide for its people based on consensus thinking about what poor people need — a liberal, top-down attitude. (I find myself bemused that I’m on the right side of this debate.)

Banerjee and Duflo report that their observations and research results support each of these two approaches — and sometimes both — depending on what issue they study. Hunger, health, education, financial services, family planning, business development, policy options: each field offers up a unique picture of success and failure attributed to one or another of the two approaches. In other words, circumstances and details matter, all of which may vary from one country to another. There is no silver bullet, they assert, no panacea to eliminate poverty.

Poor Economics focuses on the overarching question of whether there is such a thing as a “poverty trap.” Sachs contends there is: poor people will be stuck in poverty unless and until they are given the resources to release themselves from the trap. In many circumstances, Banerjee and Duflo find scant evidence to support this assertion. In others, however, they see the need for government intervention in the lives of the poor because otherwise they will perceive no reason to act for themselves.

Rather than identifying a simple, unitary explanation why Sachs’ approach often fails, they emphasize “ideology, ignorance, and inertia — the three I’s — on the part of the expert, the aid worker, or the local policy maker.” These three I’s, they claim, “often explain why policies fail and why aid does not have the effect it should.” Banerjee and Duflo explain further: “The poor often resist the wonderful plans we think up for them because they do not share our faith that those plans work, or work as well as we claim.”

It would be difficult to find two scholars better prepared than Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo to forge a middle course through the opposite poles of thought about global poverty erected by Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly. Banerjee, an Indian economist who is also the son of two economists, holds an endowed chair in economics at MIT. He co-founded MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab with Duflo, a French economist and a former MacArthur Fellow (recipient of the “genius” award).

For anyone who seeks deeper understanding of global poverty and the ways and means of fighting it, Poor Economics is must reading. This book is the latest I’ve read in my ongoing effort to study world poverty. For a list of additional books on the topic, go to my reading list.

An exceptional tale of Botswana’s #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

A review of The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, by Alexander McCall Smith

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Many years ago, when I was pretending to be a science fiction writer, I got to know a famous figure in the genre. Though he himself never admitted as much, I was told that he had worked himself through a prestigious college in the 1950s by turning out shelves-full of sci-fi novels at a penny a word. He rented an office near campus and would show up every weekday morning at 9, remove the cover of his typewriter, and begin typing — nonstop, and without hesitation — until precisely noon. At that point, he would recover the typewriter and leave for lunch and his afternoon classes. Now, some four decades later, I’m inclined to believe that story, because he is credited with having published a total of more than 300 books, a fair number of them award-winners.

Alexander McCall Smith must be a little like that sci-fi writer. Not a lot — just a little, just in the ease with which he manages to write. After all, he has published a total of just 72 books: 36 novels, 21 children’s books, 3 short story collections, and 12 academic texts. But, to give the guy a break, during most of his 64 years he was employed full-time as a teacher of medical law at the University of Edinburgh and other universities. In fact, Smith is renowned worldwide as an expert in the field of medical ethics. By comparison, the sci-fi author I alluded to above has worked full-time as a writer ever since graduating from college.

The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection is the 13th and latest in Smith’s best-known series of novels about the #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Gaborone, the capital of the small, land-locked nation of Botswana, bordering South Africa. To my mind, it’s one of the best. As always, the story revolves around the lives of Mma (“Ms.”) Precious Ramotswe, founder and proprietor of the agency, and her consistently exasperating assistant, Mma Grace Makutsi. Grace graduated from the local secretarial school with an unprecedented grade of 97 percent on her final exam — and she never lets anyone, and I mean anyone, walk into the office without learning about it.

Here, for example, is a typical comment by Mma Makutsi on a statement by Mma Potokwane, Mma Ramotswe’s friend, who was despairing of her life at the time:

“Nobody is useless,” she said heatedly, “and you are less useless than nobody else, Mma. Definitely.” This remark was greeted with silence while Mma Ramotswe and Mma Potokwane had tried to work out what it meant. The spirit in which it was made, though, was clear enough, and Mma Potokwane simply thanked her.”

In The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi are confronted with a series of surprises: the completely unexpected visit of their idol, Clovis Andersen of Muncie, Indiana, author of The Principles of Private Detection; the shocking dismissal of Mma Ramotswe’s good friend, Mma Potokwane, as matron of the orphan farm; and the arrest of Fanwell, a young man who apprenticed with Mma Ramotswe’s husband (“the finest mechanic in Botswana”), Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, and now works for him as a certified mechanic. Each of these story lines moves along at the measured pace of life in the near-desert of Botswana. As always, of course, Mma Ramotswe solves every mystery and rights every wrong, but this time she receives timely help from her hero, Clovis Andersen.

If there’s a single word that sums up the novels in the #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, it’s “charming.” These are books full of gentle humor, folk wisdom, and a view of life and the world that is both generous and optimistic. However, The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection dwells more on the story’s setting, exploring the land, its history, and its people more in-depth than in previous books in the series. In the background — always in the background, but unmistakably present — are poverty, the AIDS epidemic, and the tragic events that unfold with alarming frequency in Botswana’s neighbors.

If you haven’t read any of the previous 12 books, you might find The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection to be a good place to start.