Books 2022: The Knowledge and Necessity of Saving Strangers Drowning

Ebook: Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help

Writer: Larissa MacFarquhar

Evaluation by: Michelle Nunn, president and CEO of CARE, a world nonprofit with 7,000 staff members working in additional than 100 nations to save lots of lives, defeat poverty, and obtain social justice.

We live at a time when the daunting enormity of world inequities have by no means been extra clearly seen to us. Hundreds of thousands of us can, and do, fly off for tropical holidays whereas tens of millions of others are fleeing local weather change, not capable of subsist as smallholder farmers in Bangladesh or Somalia. These surreal contrasting realities are beamed into our houses and telephones day by day. We sit for hours watching Million Greenback Seashore Homes after which flip to photographs of a determined international starvation disaster. More often than not, we numb ourselves to the unjust methods through which individuals exist and settle for this as normative.

Larissa MacFarquhar’s Strangers Drowning jars us from complacency with an exploration of these uncommon people who act with radical empathy and battle the world’s gross inequities in pursuit of dignity and safety for everybody.

The guide is a fantastically rendered contemplation of what we owe each other on this planet and what residing with absolute ethical alignment would possibly imply. MacFarquhar weaves collectively tales of individuals whose beliefs and actions are in sync, who transcend boundaries within the pursuit of residing for others. They courageous jungles to create communities for lepers, threat their lives to ship help in battle and quit their kidneys for strangers. MacFarquhar confronts a world that always marginalizes and even ridicules those that deal with strangers drowning as if they’re their very own.

As we enter 2023 and face into existential challenges to democracy and the sustainability of our planet, this guide holds the mirror as much as every of us and implicitly asks what it will imply to reside undivided lives of radical idealism. It’s a well timed and worthy consideration, and “Strangers Drowning” is a vital provocation as we face the ethical calls for of our time.

Editor’s notes: International Atlanta will obtain a ten % fee on any buy of this guide via the hyperlinks on this web page. 

Annually, International Atlanta asks influential readers and group leaders to overview essentially the most impactful guide they learn through the course of the yr. This endeavor has continued yearly since 2010.

See last year’s full list of books on BookShop here, and all 2021 reader picks here.

All books have been chosen and opinions written independently, with solely gentle enhancing from our employees.