Description
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
Bloomberg • Forbes • The Spectator
Recipient of Foreign Policy’s 2013 Albie Award
In 2006, Jeffrey Sachs—celebrated economist, special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, and creator of the influential bestseller The End of Poverty— launched the Millennium Villages Project, a daring, $120-million experiment designed to check his theories about ending poverty. For 6 years, Nina Munk shadowed Sachs on his journeys to Africa, listened in on conversations with heads-of-state and humanitarian organizations, and immersed herself within the lives of other people in two remote African villages. Munk came to be aware the true-life problems that challenge Sachs’s formula for ending global poverty. The Idealist is the profound and moving story of what happens when the abstract theories of a super, driven man meet the realities of human life.