Review by New York Times Review
THINK OF ONE of your moderately expensive indulgences. Maybe it's dinner once a week at a nice restaurant, or hard-to-get concert tickets. Or even a daily subscription to this newspaper. What if I could persuade you that the dollars you spent on these things could save the lives of exactly 43 people in a hungry African village, or rescue precisely 11 girls from sex trafficking in Asia? Would you give up your pleasure to rescue those distant strangers? The "do-gooders" in Larissa MacFarquhar's new book, "Strangers Drowning," make these kinds of calculations every day. Obsessively. They sacrifice little luxuries and add up the lives they've saved. Then they wonder if they should give up more things they don't need: cable television, having children, a new winter coat, that extra kidney they've been carrying around forever. After Julia Wise allowed her boyfriend to buy her a $4 candy apple, she was overwhelmed with tortured thoughts. "With her selfish, ridiculous desire for a candy apple," MacFarquhar writes, "she might have deprived a family of an anti-malarial bed net or deworming medicine that might have saved the life of one of its children." "Strangers Drowning" is a journey through the "am I doing enough" world of ambitious altruism and ascetic selflessness. The book unfolds, for the most part, as a series of finely tuned character studies of Wise and other "do-gooders," an inelegant term MacFarquhar is forced to use for lack of better synonyms. Wise became a social worker and married Jeff Kaufman, a young professional who was just as focused on giving. Their shared mission is to send money to people in distant countries and thus reduce the world's suffering. To do so, they labor and scrimp and save - having lived at one point on a self-imposed weekly allowance of $38 - so that they can give away tens of thousands of dollars to charity. "All their donations and self-imposed frugality meant that Julia and Jeff thought about money quite a lot, and some people found this off-putting, especially since the amounts involved were relatively small," MacFarquhar writes. Should we admire people like Julia and Jeff, and celebrate their generosity and maybe even seek to emulate their saintliness? Or are we right in finding them incredibly annoying, and wondering if their need to give so much and so often is really just the product of a lot of messed-up psychology? MacFarquhar, a longtime writer for The New Yorker, tackles these questions with great intelligence and empathy. Her subjects include a Methodist minister who allows the homeless to move into her abode; a scion of an upper-caste family in India who turns his back on his privilege and founds a leper colony; and a Los Angeles woman who braves threats of rape to set up a women's health clinic in a jungle in Nicaragua. Thanks to MacFarquhar's curiosity and insight, and her embrace of complexity and ambiguity in storytelling, these portraits don't read at all like a secular version of "Lives of the Saints." Martyrdom doesn't seem to be the point, not even for the man who donates his kidney to a complete stranger. Without exception, MacFarquhar's do-gooders are as messed up and conflicted as the rest of us, if not more so. They long for connectedness and a sense of purpose. Most come from comfortable backgrounds, though Sue Hoag and Hector Badeau are an exception to this rule. They're a working-class couple (Badeau is one of 16 children of a Quebec family) who realize after having two kids and adopting two more that they have a gift for raising children. In the same way other people take to the violin or gymnastics, parenting is the one thing they can do exceptionally well. In MacFarquhar's telling, Hoag and Badeau's embrace of this vocation is an all-consuming passion. They don't like changing one dirty diaper or cooking one family meal after another; but they enjoy the satisfaction they feel when they've done those things well. Each new adoption offers a rush of adrenaline and a chance to fall in love all over again. "It was like the feeling you had when you learned you were pregnant," MacFarquhar writes, describing Hoag's emotions as she prepares to add more children to her family. "You didn't know the child, you couldn't see or feel the child, the child barely existed; and yet you loved him." "Strangers Drowning" is filled with such moments. The reader may feel uplifted or disturbed by the things these altruists do and feel. MacFarquhar, however, offers their stories to the reader without commentary or judgment. Often, this reader wished she had called out her subjects for their general weirdness. There is, for instance, the exasperating "Aaron Pitkin" (MacFarquhar doesn't give us his real name), who tells his girlfriend that he can't wash the dishes because it will detract from his crusade to reduce the pain suffered by poultry and other animals. And there are the emotionally tone-deaf followers of the "effective altruism" movement, whose generosity often takes the form of bloodless, spreadsheet-style calculations. One gives away 60,000 British pounds and tells an interviewer that the polio vaccines his money paid for saved 180,000 lives: "Superman couldn't even hope to do that," he says. Another brags of saving "300 centuries of life" with his donations. ALL OF MACFARQUHAR'S altruists are ambitious. And thus all have their inevitable moment of hubris. Sue Hoag and Hector Badeau adopt one group of teenagers too many. The Methodist minister alienates her flock. Like many people who think they can change the world, there's often a touch of ruthlessness to their behavior. In several chapters that recount the long history of Western culture's attitudes toward altruists, MacFarquhar writes that the psychoanalyst Anna Freud found them to occupy a "perverse mental state" that is "always pathological, always twisted away from its original intention." Summarizing the belief of another psychoanalyst, André Green, MacFarquhar writes that the do-gooder's "extreme humility masked a dreadful pride. Ordinary people could accept that they had faults; the moral narcissist could not." Other sections of the book recount the faddish ideas of the "codependency" craze of the 1980s, and how novelists tackle altruism and ethical themes in works like "The Plague" and "Uncle Tom's Cabin." These essays are thoroughly researched and impeccably written, but their generalizations can feel hollow next to the richness and tenderness of MacFarquhar's portraits, with all their telling details, unexpected turns and wonderfully novelistic observations. When Paul Wagner donates one of his kidneys to a complete stranger, all sorts of odd consequences follow. He gets hate calls from other families whose loved ones haven't gotten kidneys yet; the older woman who received his kidney begins to act as if she were his mother. "She wanted him at her house on holidays; she hounded him about smoking." The stories in "Strangers Drowning" all have open-ended conclusions. After decades of giving, many of MacFarquhar's do-gooders feel strangely unsettled. They've discovered that sacrificing for others doesn't make them feel as if they've earned a spot in heaven. All it does is see them through one more day. HÉCTOR TOBAR'S most recent book is "Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 11, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
What happens when altruism crosses the line into activism? Why does the desire to do good frequently spawn acts that go bad? Is it possible to empathize with strangers to the detriment of one's own family, friends, and even one's self? Distinguished journalist MacFarquhar probes these questions of intent and consequences with a nimble and muscular acuity as she examines instances when the pursuit of change in the name of extreme ethics becomes so emotionally charged as to border on obsession. Citing such examples as a couple that adopted 22 children and a septuagenarian midwife who defied the Contras, MacFarquhar profiles individuals whose moral sensitivity is so heightened as to be deleterious to their goals and mission. Positioning such specific tales of sacrifice and commitment within the larger context of global needs and geopolitical realities, MacFarquhar pursues the notion that there is a way to find balance, to accept one's moral responsibility while maintaining a manageable perspective. Though her frequent use of the term do-gooder may seem pejorative, MacFarquhar treats the stories of these über-achievers with clarity and reason.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
New Yorker writer MacFarquhar brings an air of confidence and competence to the audio rendering of her debut title, which explores the lives of those known as do-gooders. As narrator, MacFarquhar seems most at ease in the portions of the book where her subjects engage in candid dialogue with friends, family, and one another; she portrays the give and take of these conversations in a natural and engaging manner. The best example involves Vermont natives Sue and Hector Badeau, whose deep religious faith led them to adopt more than 20 children with a host of special needs. MacFarquhar may not be a professional voice actor, but when she delves into the nitty-gritty of day-to-day struggles and sacrifices, she makes an emotional connection with her listening audience. A Penguin Press hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A New Yorker staff writer delves into the strange lives and curious mindsets of extreme altruists. In her debut book, MacFarquhar profiles a small, unusual collection of people who have sacrificed almost everything to help others. She calls them "do-gooders," but their morals are so acute that they can seem almost mad, like saints and martyrs. A trust-funder-turned-animal activist descends into homelessness in the name of his cause. A couple in Boston gives the vast majority of their earnings to charity but struggles with the idea of having children. A couple in Philadelphia adopts more than 20 special needs children despite the terrible cost to their own fragile psyches. A woman donates a kidney to a stranger, and her act inspires a terrible hostility from other strangers. A Buddhist priest in Japan counsels people who want to commit suicide only to have them turn on him in his hour of need. In between these profiles, MacFarquhar explores a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, religion, psychology, sociology, and literature. It's admirable that the book never descends into an opaque discussion of moral philosophy. As the author admits, "in the abstract, there are ideas about saints and perfection. Only actual lives convey fully and in a visceral way the beauty and cost of a certain kind of moral existence." The book is less a defense of sainthood than a portrait of people for whom the desire to do good often backfires, sometimes with horrible results. Yet MacFarquhar also discovers an intense compassion for these people whose lives she admires but cannot always understand. "It may be true that not everyone should be a do-gooder," the author writes. "But it is also true that these strange, hopeful, tough, idealistic, demanding, life-threatening, and relentless people, by their extravagant example, help keep those life-sustaining qualities alive." Fascinating and terrifying portraits of saints and ministers of grace. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
