 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com For the first 5,000 copies of The Blue Sweater purchased, a $15 donation per book will be made to Acumen Fund, a nonprofit that invests in transformative businesses to solve the problems of poverty. The Blue Sweater is the inspiring story of a woman who left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty and find powerful new ways of tackling it. It all started back home in Virginia, with the blue sweater, a gift that quickly became her prized possession—until the day she outgrew it and gave it away to Goodwill. Eleven years later in Africa, she spotted a young boy wearing that very sweater, with her name still on the tag inside. That the sweater had made its trek all the way to Rwanda was ample evidence, she thought, of how we are all connected, how our actions—and inaction—touch people every day across the globe, people we may never know or meet. From her first stumbling efforts as a young idealist venturing forth in Africa to the creation of the trailblazing organization she runs today, Novogratz tells gripping stories with unforgettable characters—women dancing in a Nairobi slum, unwed mothers starting a bakery, courageous survivors of the Rwandan genocide, entrepreneurs building services for the poor against impossible odds. She shows, in ways both hilarious and heartbreaking, how traditional charity often fails, but how a new form of philanthropic investing called "patient capital" can help make people self-sufficient and can change millions of lives. More than just an autobiography or a how-to guide to addressing poverty, The Blue Sweater is a call to action that challenges us to grant dignity to the poor and to rethink our engagement with the world. |
Average Customer Rating:   Recommended reading. Here is a book that gives an alternative to the all-too-prevalent belief that the best way to help poor people is to give them money or stuff. The author gently enlightens the reader that the people we Westerners usually consider "poor" can actually live rich, meaningful, valuable lives, despite how we view their conditions. In light of this she offers an alternative to traditional charity: providing education and opportunity rather than free money or material goods.
This is not a dry persuasion paper, but a thesis revealed through autobiographical stories. Early on in the book she states, "I'd seen the incredible potential of the poorest people--the poorest women, who just needed a chance, not a handout." She demonstrates this page after page through her personal experiences and travels in the developing world.
I recommend this book to anyone who is considering doing relief work, or who just want to make wise decisions about what types of organizations to support. The Blue Sweater "The Blue Sweater" grabs your attention from the very start. It offers powerful stories of success and failure. Hats off to Jacqueline Novogratz for her compassion, honesty, bravery, conviction, and good humor. If you are interested in what it takes to make a real difference in the lives of the third world poor; this is the book for you! Blue Sweater Someone recommended this for my book club, but I had a hard time finishing it. I think it was very neat what she did and very inspiring, but wasn't one of my favorites. Learning to Listen Listen to the marketplace; lead from behind; revel in and remember how interconnected our world is; follow your heart and sound logic... these are all messages I garnered from The Blue Sweater. Having said that, this short list hardly captures the emotions I felt as I read pages about meeting individuals with incredible entrepreneurial spirit, about the challenges of and set backs of development, about the victories and tragedies in people's lives, and most of all, about the new age of empowerment, collaboration, and inclusiveness in business.
What struck me the most was that The Blue Sweater captured much of what I have recently been thinking and it articulated and confirmed many of my beliefs, especially in the power of markets and individuals to address our world's most serious challenges. It also helped me solidify many of my ideas, and it lent me a wise and experienced perspective. In vicariously allowing me to experience the places, the people, the challenges, the mistakes, and the inventions of Jaqueline Novogratz, The Blue Sweater opened up a wealth of knowledge and understanding to me, which I could not have accessed through a textbook.
From Jacqueline Novogratz's story, I have learned about business, about humanity, and about leadership. Every anecdote was insightful and illustrative. I am sad its over. Earnest Goes to Africa I enjoyed this book and would recommend it due to the very interesting experiences Ms Novogratz had in Africa. Her interaction with people involved on all sides of the Rwandan genocide was moving. The main point I got from the book was that the traditional approaches to charity fail precisely because the recipients know that very little is expected of them and the aid is not distributed to people or businesses which are expected to be self-sustaining. However, this would have been a more interesting book if Ms Novogratz were no longer in the philanthropy industry. She's clearly torn between her personal experiences which taught her that a more `capitalistic' approach is needed, versus not alienating people in her industry, which I suspect are hostile to the free-market message. It's as though she's signaling to the philanthropic crowd throughout the book; 'Hey, while the main idea of my book is that your anti-capitalist, albeit well-intentioned, mindset towards the poor have not only failed to do good, but have actually done great harm, I don't want you guys to feel bad about it.'
In a way, the style in which Ms Novogratz wrote the book oddly mirrors her experiences in Africa. Early on, we read almost exasperated as she recounts how she is insulted and marginalized by persons and organizations supposed to be working with her. You are hoping that she stands up for herself and state her case more forcefully. Especially when earlier she had fondly recalled the Catholic women in her family who `worked hard and lived out loud.' But their loud voices, like their Catholicism I suspect, was something apparently left back home. Confrontations never really occur.
Similarly, while her first-hand experiences argue for a more capitalistic approach, she spends too much effort trying to mitigate the message. Early on she cautions us about the `cruelty of an unbridled capitalistic system' and `those who insist on a singular ideology,' but yet the experiences she relates expose mainly the cruelty of aid without structure or expectations. In that way, I thought she wrote an intellectually honest book, since her experiences seem to belie her stated beliefs.
I'm not sure why this bothered me, but it did. Below is list of the people quoted at the beginning of the chapters. Now I suppose it's possible that Ms Novogratz happened to be moved by everyone in the list, but much more likely that the list was put together by someone anxious not to offend. I guess that some habits, like some blue sweaters, are hard to shake. The cynic in me wonders if they broke up some of the chapters to get a few more quotes in. 'Hey, Jackie, we need a quote from a Muslim. Where's Maathai from? Never mind, we're going with the Koran.'
1- Nelson Mandela
2- Eleanor Roosevelt
3- Lu Xun
4- Marian Wright Edelman
5 -Madagasy Proverb
6- Okot P'Bitek
7- Rainer Maria Rilke
8- George Bernard Shaw
9- Buddha
10- Gandhi
11- Martin Luther King, Jr
12- The Koran
13- Wangari Maathai
14- Lao Tzu
15- Oliver Wendell Holmes
16- Robert F Kennedy |  |
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