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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 author of the influential bestseller The End of Poverty-- launched the Millennium Villages Project, a daring, $120-million experiment designed to test his theories about ending poverty. For six years, Nina Munk shadowed Sachs on his trips to Africa, listened in on conversations with heads-of-state and humanitarian organizations, and immersed herself in the lives of people in two remote African villages. Munk came to understand the real-life issues 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 brilliant, driven man meet the realities of human life.
About the author
Nina Munk, a contributing editor at
Vanity Fair, is a journalist and the author of
Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner. She was previously a senior writer at
Fortune, and before that a senior editor at
Forbes. Her work has appeared in
Vanity Fair, the
New York Times Magazine, the
New Yorker,
Fortune, and the
New York Times. She lives in New York.