Giving is about exactly what the title says: Bill Clinton wants to encourage you to give to charity, and breaks up the book into 11 separate chapters on how you, gentle reader, can go about giving more of yourself than you ever thought possible. It is not a direct campaign for Hilary, although there are certainly parts of the book where he highlights both her humanitarian record as well as his own foundation’s work. And, unlike My Life, it is possible to get through the entire book.
Whether or not the book does its job is open to debate; while some of Clinton’s entreaties are easy to implement (for example, his description of the micro-lending site Kiva, a website where individuals can make loans to small businesspeople worldwide, has contributed to a sharp bump in that charity’s website traffic), most of the book concerns people who have either made a fortune and are able to give it all away or people who heard the calling to public service as strongly as those who enter the priesthood. It would be hard for Clinton to expect that the average reader could drop everything to, say, join Dr. Paul Farmer at Partners in Health, a charity he formed to bring health care to the world’s poor after he grew up in a trailer park and attended Harvard Medical School. What Clinton is really doing – and uses hundreds of examples to bludgeon the reader while doing it – is letting the world know that Americans make a positive difference everywhere.
Most of Clinton’s examples are too life-altering to be a practical guide (or, if you are a glass-half-full type, inspire a reader to make a difference). Giving has a global focus, and talks extensively about our efforts to bring food, water, education, health care and economic stability to the world through a variety of NGOs and corporate programs. Of course, the focus is not solely on America – U2’s Bono has a passage dedicated to him, as does the Indian businessman Rajat Gupta.
But if you pick up this book hoping for more than a very long stump speech on the importance of giving to charity, then Giving will disappoint. The closest thing to any real insight is Clinton’s throwaway passage in the last chapter of the book where he outlines five things he believes that the next president will have to tackle. This would be fantastic if he were to produce a plan or even point to one, but his five topics – terrorism, the environment (in two parts), economic inequality, and health care – are sufficiently broad to feel like a syllabus for a public policy program.
That said, Giving does perform one task admirably: it highlights programs in which individual readers of ordinary means could participate. For those readers inclined to skim, most of these opportunities can be found in chapters two through four, Giving Money, Giving Time and Giving Things, respectively. Some of the later chapters, such as where Clinton discusses organizing markets through both for-profit and non-profit companies, would be more interesting if they read more like an economics textbook. This is a shame, really – there are so many wonderful programs out there, but Giving rarely affords the reader a view of the forest for the trees.
Questions:
Do you think that Americans contributing to charity make a major difference? Or do you think that it’s the government’s job to support these types of programs both inside and outside the U.S.?
Which charity would you support, and why?