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A Path Appears
Nick Kristof, “A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity.”
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New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof hits the road, hits the world – Kenya, Bangladesh, Ferguson – then hits our buttons. What whites don’t get about race, he writes. What ISIS can teach us, he writes. And lately, above all, how we could – individually and collectively – change the world for the better. With story after story on people who just dive in and do it. Don’t throw up your hands, he writes. Use them. Change a life. Change ten. Change your own. And pretty soon, despair is cut down to size. And you feel great. This hour On Point: Nick Kristof says let’s do it. Let’s change the world.
http://onpoint.wbur.org/2014/10/22/ni...
From Tom's Reading List:
New York Times: ‘A Path Appears’ — “Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn show you, through many amazing vignettes matched with serious evidence, that you can make a difference to the lives of people trapped in misery. Those lives may be very different from yours, but the people leading them feel much the way you would if you were in their position. With a little effort you can help them enormously, but why should you bother? In “A Path Appears,” Kristof, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, and WuDunn, his wife and a former business editor at The Times, try to answer that question — and for much of the book they presume you are a calculating egoist.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/boo...
Boston Globe: ‘A Path Appears’ –“Structurally, the book’s approach is the equivalent of a great passing team in football opening a game plan not by throwing, but by pounding it out off-tackle four, five, even six plays in a row, setting up the space and opportunity to later unleash its strength. This gambit almost gets tedious, and it’s not until later that you begin to suspect that this was the point, the desired outcome: to bludgeon the reader into perceiving that what might previously have seemed exceptional could come to be seen as regular, if not quite yet a social norm.”
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books...
Christian Science Monitor: ‘A Path Appears’ considers how and why we give — “‘A Path Appears’ does replicate some of Kristof’s troubling formulas. By his own admission, his columns rely on ‘bridge characters’ – Americans, usually white, on a heroic mission abroad – to appeal to readers who might otherwise skip his column. He writes about girls’ suffering more often than that of boys for the same reason.”
http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-R...