Product Description

Here, from Bill Clinton, is a call to action. Giving is an inspiring look at how each of us can change the world. First, it reveals the extraordinary and innovative efforts now being made by companies and organizations—and by individuals—to solve problems and save lives both “down the street and around the world.” Then it urges us to seek out what each of us, “regardless of income, available time, age, and skills,” can do to help, to give people a chance to live out their dreams.

Bill Clinton shares his own experiences and those of other givers, representing a global flood tide of nongovernmental, nonprofit activity. These remarkable stories demonstrate that gifts of time, skills, things, and ideas are as important and effective as contributions of money. From Bill and Melinda Gates to a six-year-old California girl named McKenzie Steiner, who organized and supervised drives to clean up the beach in her community, Clinton introduces us to both well-known and unknown heroes of giving. Among them:

Dr. Paul Farmer, who grew up living in the family bus in a trailer park, vowed to devote his life to giving high-quality medical care to the poor and has built innovative public health-care clinics first in Haiti and then in Rwanda;
a New York couple, in Africa for a wedding, who visited several schools in Zimbabwe and were appalled by the absence of textbooks and school supplies. They founded their own organization to gather and ship materials to thirty-five schools. After three years, the percentage of seventh-graders who pass reading tests increased from 5 percent to 60 percent;'
Oseola McCarty, who after seventy-five years of eking out a living by washing and ironing, gave $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi to endow a scholarship fund for African-American students;
Andre Agassi, who has created a college preparatory academy in the Las Vegas neighborhood with the city’s highest percentage of at-risk kids. “Tennis was a stepping-stone for me,” says Agassi. “Changing a child’s life is what I always wanted to do”;
Heifer International, which gave twelve goats to a Ugandan village. Within a year, Beatrice Biira’s mother had earned enough money selling goat’s milk to pay Beatrice’s school fees and eventually to send all her children to school—and, as required, to pass on a baby goat to another family, thus multiplying the impact of the gift.

Clinton writes about men and women who traded in their corporate careers, and the fulfillment they now experience through giving. He writes about energy-efficient practices, about progressive companies going green, about promoting fair wages and decent working conditions around the world. He shows us how one of the most important ways of giving can be an effort to change, improve, or protect a government policy. He outlines what we as individuals can do, the steps we can take, how much we should consider giving, and why our giving is so important.

Bill Clinton’s own actions in his post-presidential years have had an enormous impact on the lives of millions. Through his foundation and his work in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, he has become an international spokesperson and model for the power of giving.

“We all have the capacity to do great things,” President Clinton says. “My hope is that the people and stories in this book will lift spirits, touch hearts, and demonstrate that citizen activism and service can be a powerful agent of change in the world.”

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6135 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-04
• Released on: 2007-09-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Peter Baker

Bookstore shelves are crammed with offerings by presidential candidates, but now we have the first book of the season by a candidate for first spouse. Bill Clinton titles his thin volume Giving because it extols the virtues of volunteering time and money to worthy causes. But it could just as well have been called Adjusting, as the former president seeks to define his new role while Hillary Rodham Clinton pursues his old office. "Now that we've switched places," he writes, it is his turn to influence events without government portfolio. And perhaps from a perch no man has ever occupied. In Giving, readers and voters in effect get a preview of what a Bill Clinton-run East Wing might look like -- focused on fighting poverty, disease and climate change around the world and rallying the mighty and the meek to noble goals.

The notion of Bill Clinton taking on a secondary role as his wife leads a presidential campaign and, at least potentially, the country, has always been hard to imagine. For a man who has spent his life at the center of his own comet, it must be an enormous challenge to find the right place as another streaks toward the sun. Watching him on the campaign trail or on his book tour in recent days, it's easy to see a certain restless quality that has yet to be fully harnessed. As he depicts it, Clinton since leaving office has transformed his life from "getting" to "giving." Politics, he writes, "is a 'getting' business" -- getting votes, support, contributions and so on. "To balance the scales," he says, he has devoted his post-presidency to giving (neatly skipping over the fact that he has spent a good part of the last six years getting $46 million in speaking fees). Mortality, he says, pushed him to this new goal. "After I narrowly escaped what could have been a fatal heart attack in 2004," he writes, "I felt that way even more strongly."

What he has produced in Giving is his own version of It Takes a Village, and with an initial print run of 750,000, Knopf clearly hopes to duplicate Hillary Clinton's publishing success. (An unspecified portion of the proceeds will go to the causes mentioned in the book.) But Giving is not so much a book as an extended public service announcement masquerading as a book. It is essentially a long laundry list of efforts funded by the Clinton Foundation or admired by its founder, punctuated by entreaties to the reader to follow their example. They're doing it, why can't you? To explore why people devote time, money and energy to public causes, the author turns to celebrity friends such as Oprah Winfrey, Andre Agassi and Warren Buffett for a few sentences about how they realized it was better to give than to receive. He also gives shout-outs to some of his favorite fundraising and business buddies, such as supermarket mogul Ron Burkle and Indian businessman Rajat Gupta. And he strokes some who might be helpful to his wife's campaign, lavishing praise, for instance, on his former vice president, Al Gore, who remains on the electoral sidelines with a potent following.

To be sure, Clinton recounts some truly inspiring stories, many of them already famous. There is Oseola McCarty, a retired cleaning lady in Mississippi who gave her life's savings to the University of Southern Mississippi for a scholarship fund for poor African Americans. There is Paul Farmer, who grew up living in a trailer park, a boat and even a tent but graduated from Harvard Medical School and went on to devote his life to fighting AIDS and tuberculosis in destitute places around the world. And there is, eventually, Bill Clinton. He resists for 186 pages before succumbing to the temptation to recite the accomplishments of his (first?) eight years in the White House: a numbers-laden litany of how many millions of Americans now get family leave, safer drinking water, patients' rights, college aid and immunization who wouldn't have gotten it had a guy named Clinton not been president. Then he helpfully rattles off a five-point platform for the next president -- whoever that might be -- centered on terrorism, climate change, economic inequality, health care and energy. Yet if readers hope to learn more about Clinton's own inner world in this fascinating time of political dynasty-building and gender reversal -- and let's face it, Knopf wouldn't print three-quarters of a million copies if the name on the cover were John Smith -- they will have to look elsewhere.

Beyond the stump speech, Clinton keeps his attention on his subjects and offers little in the way of personal introspection. In the end, one thing Giving doesn't give us is enough insight into its author.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From AudioFile
Its inspiring to hear how individuals can change the world. President Clinton writes about innovative philanthropic and social action by individuals and corporations that effect change both down the street and across the globe. He offers specific ways that individuals can make a difference in their giving and in their actions. In addition to sharing his own experiences since his presidency, he discusses a range of activists--from Bill Gates to ordinary neighborhood leaders. Clintons reading style is engaging and easy to listen to without being pedantic. But his delivery is rushed. Also, he makes reference to illustrations in the print version that are not included with the audio version. R.C.G. 2008 Grammy Nominee © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A few years ago Sheri Saltzberg and Mark Grashow of New York, recently retired from public health administration and teaching, went to Zambia for a wedding. Their son suggested they go to Zimbabwe to visit a family that had befriended him and to see Victoria Falls. While they were there, they visited several schools and were appalled to see that there were no textbooks, empty libraries, no science equipment, no basic school supplies, and often no school breakfast or lunch.

When they got home they founded their own NGO, the U.S.-Africa Children's Fellowship, and formed a partnership with the Zimbabwe Organization of Rural Associations for Progress, which had been working since 1980 to help improve the economy and education in individual communities.

Over the next two years, they located thirty-five U.S. schools to partner with thirty-five schools in Zimbabwe, and they've shipped four forty-foot containers to the schools, with more than 150,000 books, school supplies, toys, games, sports equipment, bicycles, clothing, sewing machines, agricultural tools, and other items. They raise funds for items needed but not donated–school uniforms, locally printed books, and educational materials and scholarships.

In the U.S. partner schools, Mark and Sheri try to give students an appreciation for what life is like for their counterparts in Zimbabwe. American kids learn that the kids in their partner school often get up at 5 a.m. to walk several miles to school, may well have nothing to eat, and may have lost one or both parents to AIDS. They also learn that many kids don't go to school at all because they can't afford the school fees, uniforms, or even a notebook and pencil; they have to work to support or stay home to care for a sick parent or younger sibling; or they don't have shoes and can't walk long distances in winter. The American children are empowered to take action—collecting donations and writing letters to the Zimbabwean students.

Mark and Sheri themselves fly to Zimbabwe as each shipment arrives and help distribute the donations to the schools. "The effects of the shipment have far exceeded anything we dreamed of" says Mark. "For the first time, students can take books home to read. Five percent of the kids in the seventh grade used to pass reading tests; now it's 60 percent. Three years ago, only one student in his district passed his A-level exams for university. This year, thirty-eight students passed. There are now art and sewing classes. Soccer flourishes because there's an abundance of soccer balls. Attendance in many kindergartens has increased threefold due to the introduction of toys. In September we'll increase the schools we partner with from thirty-five to fifty." The program has proven so successful, there's now a waiting list of three hundred schools.

Why did they do this? Mark says, "I believe that each of us has an obligation to level the playing field of life. Schools that have no books, communities without water, and people without access to medical care are not someone else's problem. We all have a capacity to make a difference somewhere. We just have to decide if we have the will to do it."

To be connected to hundreds of nonprofits and organizations doing great work, view the resources guide at www.clintonfoundation.org/giving

Customer Reviews

Giving? - Yes. Changing the world? Not quite.
Give! Give money. Give time. Give Stuff. This book is all about how to give more to charity. If you are inclined to give, I think this book might give you some new places to look. If you aren't inclined to give, neither will it convince you to start.

The book is a laundry list of ways to give. I enjoyed the writing style. It's a pretty quick read, and I made a fair number of notes about things to go look up further. However there are not good citations for various provided statistics which makes them a little suspect.

The book really doesn't rank alternatives, give suggestions for which are better in the author's opinion, or otherwise make suggestions. I would prefer to see a more clear distinction of what works and what doesn't. In this sense it fails to come through on the 'How each of us can change the world' portion of the title. Examples of affecting 1,000,000 lives are mixed in with examples of helping 10 people. Giving is *not* a social good on its own. It's the impact of the giving which most of us care about. This book just focuses on the giving.

Although there are chapters on Organizing Markets and social business' and other ways to give that are more aligned with the way I think philanthropy should be done, the book is essentially about old fashioned charity and volunteering. I personally have some basic philosophical difficulties with this model of social good. I prefer to see things done either at the societal level as advocated in Sachs' "The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time", or through social business similar to what is advocated in Yunnus' "Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism". My primary problem with individual charity is that it calls on the good hearted to bear more of the burden than the greedy. I prefer systems that either make everyone equally accountable for societies needs, or provide rewards for satisfying society's needs. While this is a gross simplification, in my opinion, if you want to do some good, go get an MBA and do it on a big scale. I'm not much a fan of sacrificing personally if you are not in a position to do so. This book seems to advocate that everyone should give, even if they can do little, and even if they don't pick the recipient carefully.

I was a bit disappointed in the final chapter titled "How Much Should You Give and Why?". It stopped short of actually addressing the question, instead basically saying "it's an individual decision". I think I would have preferred a stronger statement which could have served as a center of debate, but I suppose a history in politics prevents strong statements.

Giving it a Chance
Giving is a straight forward 211+ page reason why we should give our time, money, and energy to help make a difference in he world. Clinton, fills the pages with nothing short of inspirational stories of incredible people, and how they have made an impact on the lives of others. Clinton argues that its easy to find a way to give to our world through examples of these extraordinary people such as; Bill and Melinda Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Oseola McCaty, Muhammad Yunus, Andre Agassi, Nelson Mandela, Josephine Murebwayire, Bono, and countless others whose stories were told through the pen of Bill Clinton.

Giving is easy to read, and its formatted so that you don't have read each chapter in its given numerical order, you can skip around and still feel the message. This book breaks down philanthropy into six different categories; giving time, giving things, giving skills, gift of reconciliation and new beginnings, gifts that keep giving, and giving good ideas.

Clinton makes it easy for you to want to give, not only because of the remarkable stories but because he provides all the contact information in the back for every charity, non-profit and nongovernmental organization that he mentioned to help tell his story. He does this because, "if your willing to volunteer, there is no shortage of organizations and projects that will be gland to welcome you."

Though at times some parts of the book can read a little like a brag sheet for Hillary, it doesn't take away from his main focal points. Overall it's a book that leaves you feeling inspired, motivated, informed, and ready to take action. So if you have a moment, try Giving this book a chance.

Boring book, Inspiring content
You know that part called 'Acknowledgements' which is available in almost every book and covers three or so pages? Ever read one of those? I bet you skip those pages every time!

The first two-thirds of this book gave me the exact same feeling. Every chapter covers too much names that are soon to be forgotten by the time you enter the next chapter. No matter how inspiring these people are, you cannot ask the average reader to remember the UNC, DDA, EXRE and whatever NGO is being mentioned.

And then, out of the blue, the book does get interesting. Most of this is due to the change in writing and you get a sense of personal touch in its writings. It doesn't even surprise me if Mr. Clinton only wrote some of this book.

The people mentioned in this book deserve better than just being a paragraph in a chapter. Maybe Mr. Clinton should call his good ol' pal Al and make a documentary about this book, because it does hold award-winning content...