New Review: The End of Poverty

The following is a brief excerpt from a review posted on PopandPolitics.com:

When I picked up “The End of Poverty,” the new book by world renowned clinical economist and professor Jeffrey Sachs, from a Barnes & Nobles book store a few weeks ago, the woman at the counter read the cover and said, “Ah, if only this could be true.”

Poverty is a malignance that will most likely plague humankind for as long as we inhabit the earth. However, the point of this book is not to impart some airy-fairy, half-baked idea on how to eliminate all realms of poverty from today’s world, but instead to offer up a concrete plan for eliminating “extreme poverty” from the darkest corners of modern civilization.

Certainly anyone who has grown up in America has seen poverty up close at one time or another. Beggars and homeless folks in the subway, drug addicts and dealers on the corner, children left alone in public housing for hours -- if not days -- on end; these are all examples of poverty that don't seem to be going anywhere in the near future. However, that is not the extreme poverty addressed by Sachs.

Instead, he uses "The End of Poverty" to paint a vivid picture of what real, extreme poverty looks like and why it must and can be cured within the next 20 years. In Africa, for example, where there have been societal collapses in Sudan, the Congo, and Rwanda among other places, one of the main reasons why hostilities broke out in the first place was because the people in those countries were completely bereft of any kind of assistance or real means to live.