A Little Reading

I had the eye-opening pleasure of attending the Rotary International Conference in Copenhagen and Malmo in June 2006. If you haven't attended an RI Conference, put in on your life list. Seeing the breadth of our interests and projects is breath-taking and mind-boggling. But I began to wonder: what makes a project work?

At a workshop at the conference, I heard a great deal of discussion about the successes and failures of projects, and about the desire not to have to reinvent the wheel when implementing them. Resources for avoiding reinvention are available, of course - the RI website reports success stories, for one.

But for broader background, I'd like to recommend some books - The End of Poverty, by Jeffrey Sachs, and The White Man's Burden, Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, by William Easterly. These two books will give you some some very different views, but both are great food for thought. I'd like to know of other titles any of you out there would like to recommend, and this is my modest contribution to what might be a useful book list.

Now we just need some time to read!