His analysis is depressing but quite readable -- thanks largely to his skill in giving lively names and conceptual handles to his explanations for why the West's charitable works in fact accomplish "so much ill and so little good." The do-gooders' fundamental flaw, he argues, is that they are "Planners," who seek to impose solutions from the top down, rather than "Searchers," who adapt to the real life and culture of foreign lands from the bottom up. The Planners believe in "the Big Push" -- an infusion of foreign aid and economic advice that will lift poor countries past the poverty trap and into prosperity. But the Planners are almost always wrong, Easterly contends, because they ignore the cultural, political and bureaucratic obstacles that impede the delivery of real assistance (as opposed to plans for such assistance) to the world's poor. "The right plan is to have no plan," he asserts, in an economist's version of a Zen koan.

Think of Easterly as a kind of anti-Thomas L. Friedman. His dyspeptic view of globalization contrasts with the optimism of the New York Times columnist, but he has written his broadside in a brisk, Friedman-esque style of aphorisms, anecdotes and witty headings. Some of his section and chapter titles convey the breezy tone in which he delivers his gloomy analysis: "Why Planners Cannot Bring Prosperity"; "The Legend of the Big Push"; "The Rich Have Markets, the Poor Have Bureaucrats." Scattered throughout the book are upbeat "Snapshots" of poor Africans and Asians whom Easterly, now an economics professor at New York University, met on his travels during more than 16 years spent working as a World Bank development economist; he also offers portraits of the "Searchers" who are helping the developing world.

I confess that I occasionally began to find all the aphorisms and snapshots annoying; there actually is such a thing as a book about development economics that is too readable. And I would have been happier if his sainted Searchers had been subject to a bit more of the same skepticism that Easterly applies to the odious Planners. Not to diminish the "social entrepreneurs" whom Easterly celebrates, but their well-publicized efforts are a bit of a racket too. I've met with and marveled at some of the same African and Asian innovators Easterly applauds, but it is a tad utopian to think that these little examples will add up to big changes, absent the fundamental reforms for which Easterly has such scorn. For instance, he praises the success of an NGO called Population Services International in finding a way for poor Africans to make a profit distributing the bed nets that can prevent malaria. But surely the challenge for development economists is to find ways to replicate such efforts on a larger scale, which involves the dreaded "P" word.

What makes this book valuable is its devastating detail. Easterly, the author of an influential previous book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, has assembled overwhelming evidence of how little has been accomplished with the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid money, the thousands of advisory missions, the millions of reports and studies. Rebutting the "Big Push" idea favored by World Bank planners, he notes that 22 African countries spent $342 billion on public investment from 1970 to 1994 and received another $187 billion in foreign aid over that period. But the productivity gain from all this investment was zero. As an example of the Planners' folly, he cites the $5 billion spent since 1979 on a publicly owned steel mill in Nigeria that has yet to produce any steel.

Easterly's critique of the World Bank and the IMF is persuasive. He argues that the IMF's structural-adjustment lending -- in which indebted countries get more money on the condition that they agree to Planners' free-market reforms -- simply hasn't worked. One big reason is that the IMF, like the World Bank, is always fudging its failures, finding excuses for why past aid and advice haven't worked, discovering reasons to pump in even more assistance. Indeed, Easterly finds a freakish correlation between IMF interventions and failed states. He notes the role corruption has played in distorting foreign aid and the growing insistence of aid donors on "good governance." But he cautions that attempting to change political cultures from afar often produces a show of good governance -- like the 2,400 reports Tanzania must produce every year for aid donors -- rather than the real thing. The absurdity of this hortatory culture emerges in his observation that among the 185 actions recommended by the 2002 Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development was "efficient use of cow dung."

With all of Easterly's aid-bashing, one might imagine that he is a conservative promoter of market solutions. But some of his most powerful criticism is reserved for the Planners who advocated "shock therapy" free-market reforms in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Free markets can't be imposed from outside, he insists, citing the example of the inefficient Soviet-era plants that survived their entry into the market era via their communist bosses' genius for bartering and cronyism. "The Soviet-trained plant managers at the bottom outwitted the shock therapists at the top," he writes. He finds a similar failure of free-market diktats in Latin America. The best era for Latin American growth was 1950 to 1980, the heyday of state intervention, while growth slowed in the market-reform years of the 1990s. As a result, Easterly argues, "the backlash against free markets is unfortunately now gaining strength in Latin America."

So what works? Easterly's argument is that if it's imposed from the outside, almost nothing works -- in either the economic or political sphere. It's no accident, he argues, that the great East Asian economic success stories of recent decades -- Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand -- all took place in countries that were never successfully colonized by the West. These nations evolved their own cultures, rules and disciplines and built an indigenous foundation for rapid economic growth. The region's laggard is the one nation that was colonized: the Philippines.

Easterly's dissection of the interventionist impulse of the Planners is powerful. His enthusiasm for the bottom-up successes of the Searchers is less so. He's looking hard for something encouraging to say, but it's a measure of the potency of his corrosive analysis that the good news isn't very convincing.

Reviewed by David Ignatius
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Copyright 2001 Cahners business Information, Inc.

With his new venture, Bennett shifts focus from philosophy to history. America: The Last Best Hope will be a two-volume affair dedicated to retelling the story of America's development into the world's most powerful liberal democracy. Volume I begins with the explorations of Christopher Columbus and ends with the world's plunge into the chaos of World War I.

If you believe that good historical writing involves years of archival research leading to the unearthing of new knowledge, Bennett's book will disappoint; all the references are to the works of previous historians, and no new discoveries await the reader. But non-academically trained historians have always tried to capture the grand sweep of the American past, so Bennett belongs in a long-established tradition. He has a strong sense of narrative, a flair for anecdote and a lively style. And the American story really is a remarkable one, filled with its share of brilliant leaders and tragic mistakes. Bennett brings that story to life. The pessimism of the Federalists in an increasingly democratic society, James K. Polk's war against Mexico, the Mormon Great Trek -- all are related with a sense of excitement and engagement.

Pundit that he is, Bennett is not content just with narration; he also has lessons to impart. Americans, he believes, fail to appreciate the great things their country has achieved; a rousing, explicitly patriotic history can help them overcome the cynical defeatism that he sees lurking in contemporary society. This sounds like a formula for right-wing political correctness, and to some degree it is. Bennett defends Spanish colonization; excuses away the three-fifths rule that enabled slave-owners to increase their power by counting 60 percent of every slave as a person for purposes of congressional representation; bends over backward to understand why settlers might hate Native Americans (although he properly criticizes Andrew Jackson's vicious campaign of Indian removal); and claims that racial segregation harmed both whites and blacks.

Still, Bennett on balance resists a moralistic tale in favor of a nuanced one. As might be expected from so pugnacious a commentator, he takes sides. But the sides he takes are surprising. Americans throughout their history have been divided into camps not unlike the liberals and conservatives of today. Depending on the circumstances in which they lived, some of our leaders believed in a strong national government and equal citizenship for all, while others pledged their allegiance to state and local authority and were quite content to live in a society in which inequalities of birth were reinforced by existing institutions and practices. Bennett nearly always takes the side of the former against the latter.

Nowhere are Bennett's sympathies more strongly pronounced than in his discussion of the ideas and events leading up to the Civil War. American conservatism has long had a tendency to romanticize the Old South as a land of virtue and courage. Bennett will have none of it. Not a trace of sympathy for slavery and slave-owners appears in his book. He castigates John C. Calhoun, slavery's most brilliant defender, for bringing on the conflict. He denounces the Dred Scott decision as "inimical to the Founders' vision." He has nothing but praise for Frederick Douglass and his campaign for equal rights. Bennett is a Lincoln man, pure and simple.

Bennett takes the same side when discussing periods in which Americans were divided over the role of government in their society. He prefers James Madison's more restrained Virginia Resolution defending states' rights to Thomas Jefferson's more secessionist-leaning Kentucky one. Theodore Roosevelt gets more praise than William McKinley. Bennett's America even holds a place for labor leaders such as Samuel Gompers. Immigration and religious pluralism are welcomed by him. (Sometimes, in fact, his book reads like a Catholic -- more specifically, an Irish Catholic -- history of America.) Bennett may be a conservative today, but he has little positive to say about Know-Nothings, Copperheads and isolationists, all of whom were conservatives yesterday.

Liberal readers will be wary of his explicitly nationalistic history. They ought instead to recognize what a tribute to liberalism this book is. Precisely because he is so proud of his country and wants to celebrate its greatness, Bennett calls attention to all those movements toward liberty and equality that enabled the United States to expand its ideals and strengthen its citizens. The fact that so prominent a conservative as Bennett accepts nearly all the major reforms of the 19th century suggests just how much the current American consensus remains a liberal consensus. Whether he finds the same to be true of the 20th century awaits Volume II of America: The Last Best Hope.

Reviewed by Alan Wolfe
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Some of the strongest passages in 1776 are the revealing and well-rounded portraits of the Georges on both sides of the Atlantic. King George III, so often portrayed as a bumbling, arrogant fool, is given a more thoughtful treatment by McCullough, who shows that the king considered the colonists to be petulant subjects without legitimate grievances--an attitude that led him to underestimate the will and capabilities of the Americans. At times he seems shocked that war was even necessary. The great Washington lives up to his considerable reputation in these pages, and McCullough relies on private correspondence to balance the man and the myth, revealing how deeply concerned Washington was about the Americans' chances for victory, despite his public optimism. Perhaps more than any other man, he realized how fortunate they were to merely survive the year, and he willingly lays the responsibility for their good fortune in the hands of God rather than his own. Enthralling and superbly written, 1776 is the work of a master historian. --Shawn Carkonen

The Other 1776

With his riveting, enlightening accounts of subjects from Johnstown Flood to John Adams, David McCullough has become the historian that Americans look to most to tell us our own story. In his Amazon.com interview, McCullough explains why he turned in his new book from the political battles of the Revolution to the battles on the ground, and he marvels at some of his favorite young citizen soldiers who fought alongside the remarkable General Washington.

The Essential David McCullough

John Adams	Truman	Mornings on Horseback
The Path Between the Seas	The Great Bridge	The Johnstown Flood

More Reading on the Revolution

The Great Improvisation by Stacy Schiff	Washington's Crossing by David Hackett Fischer	His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis
Washington's General by Terry Golway	Iron Tears by Stanley Weintraub	Victory at Yorktown by Richard M. Ketchum

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Bestselling historian and two-time Pulitzer winner McCullough follows up John Adams by staying with America's founding, focusing on a year rather than an individual: a momentous 12 months in the fight for independence. How did a group of ragtag farmers defeat the world's greatest empire? As McCullough vividly shows, they did it with a great deal of suffering, determination, ingenuity—and, the author notes, luck.Although brief by McCullough's standards, this is a narrative tour de force, exhibiting all the hallmarks the author is known for: fascinating subject matter, expert research and detailed, graceful prose. Throughout, McCullough deftly captures both sides of the conflict. The British commander, Lord General Howe, perhaps not fully accepting that the rebellion could succeed, underestimated the Americans' ingenuity. In turn, the outclassed Americans used the cover of night, surprise and an abiding hunger for victory to astonishing effect. Henry Knox, for example, trekked 300 miles each way over harsh winter terrain to bring 120,000 pounds of artillery from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston, enabling the Americans, in a stealthy nighttime advance, to seize Dorchester Heights, thus winning the whole city.Luck, McCullough writes, also played into the American cause—a vicious winter storm, for example, stalled a British counterattack at Boston, and twice Washington staged improbable, daring escapes when the war could have been lost. Similarly, McCullough says, the cruel northeaster in which Washington's troops famously crossed the Delaware was both "a blessing and a curse." McCullough keenly renders the harshness of the elements, the rampant disease and the constant supply shortfalls, from gunpowder to food, that affected morale on both sides—and it certainly didn't help the British that it took six weeks to relay news to and from London. Simply put, this is history writing at its best from one of its top practitioners.
Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Packed with recommendations of the world's best places to visit, on and off the beaten path, 1,000 PLACES TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE is a joyous, passionate gift for travelers, an around-the-world, continent-by-continent listing of beaches, museums, monuments, islands, inns, restaurants, mountains, and more. There's Botswana's Okavango Delta, the covered souks of Aleppo, the Tuscan hills surrounding San Gimignano, Canyon de Chelly, the Hassler hotel in Rome, Ipanema Beach, the backwaters of Kerala, Oaxaca's Saturday market, the Buddhas of Borobudur, Ballybunion golf club-all the places guaranteed to give you the shivers.

The prose is gorgeous, seizing on exactly what makes each entry worthy of inclusion. And, following the romance, the nuts and bolts: addresses, phone and fax numbers, web sites, costs, and best times to visit.