In an intriguing blend of travel writing and analysis, moving portraits and comic tales, Stackhouse tells the personal stories of some of the world's poorest people and shows how they are going to end global poverty in the next century. He provides haunting details of lives and communities destroyed by misplaced aid and government interventions. But more importantly he shows how individuals are finding the creativity and means to make their own lives better. Time and again, Stackhouse sees what happens when people have a say in the fate of their schools, forests, fields and governments: they do what no development agency or government mega-project has been able to achieve. They thrive. They may continue to be humble but they are no longer desperate. John Stackhouse's eight-year journey among the poor leads us away from despair. Poverty, he writes, is not an inevitable part of the human condition but a direct result of human actions - and something that can be remedied.
About the Author, John Stackhouse
Few foreign journalists have travelled to more villages or remote districts than John Stackhouse. For eight years, he was based in New Dehli as The Globe and Mail's development issues reporter but spent much of his time living with poor farmers, fisherman, lepers and slum-dwellers, travelling by third-class rail through India or by boat through Borneo. He has won five National Newspaper Awards - one for his eye-opening account of life for the homeless on Toronto streets - A National Magazine Award and an Amnesty International prize for foreign reporting.
