A review by divyasudhakar
Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help by Larissa MacFarquhar
4.0
I came to this book at a very confusing time in my own life, a time when I've been wondering if I do enough to lead a meaningful life. So it didn't get my most objective reviewing self. That said, this is an excellent book. I appreciate the format of it, interweaving stories of extreme do-gooders with short essays of how society views do-gooders.
The essays didn't move me as much as the stories themselves. While it was interesting to see how society's views on altruism have evolved over the ages, it was more illuminating to read these stories of people who grew up in different conditions (some come from broken homes, others don't), with different religious leanings (some are deeply religious and others are not) and even different views on how to best help people struggle (some try to maximize their impact on the world while ignoring or underplaying the emotional trappings of altruism and others choose to help a small group of children in their homes) to answer their personal calls of duty. It goes a long way in fleshing out the complexity of these people while most of us would tend to stick them in a bucket for slightly mentally ill, saint figures.
While Larissa never criticizes her subjects, she does point out some of the criticisms they've received, like the man who donated his kidney to a stranger being criticized for playing God and deciding who gets his kidney. Or the couple that adopt 22 children most of who end up getting pregnant in school, dropping out and living on welfare. These are criticisms I might have come up with myself. But placed in the context of this book (or in my reading of it), they seem petty and churlish, the complaints of armchair critics who do nothing themselves and are quick to dismiss the attempts of those that do. In showing that her subjects struggle with these ideas themselves and question their work and deal with self-doubt, Larissa makes them attainable and more human.
The essays didn't move me as much as the stories themselves. While it was interesting to see how society's views on altruism have evolved over the ages, it was more illuminating to read these stories of people who grew up in different conditions (some come from broken homes, others don't), with different religious leanings (some are deeply religious and others are not) and even different views on how to best help people struggle (some try to maximize their impact on the world while ignoring or underplaying the emotional trappings of altruism and others choose to help a small group of children in their homes) to answer their personal calls of duty. It goes a long way in fleshing out the complexity of these people while most of us would tend to stick them in a bucket for slightly mentally ill, saint figures.
While Larissa never criticizes her subjects, she does point out some of the criticisms they've received, like the man who donated his kidney to a stranger being criticized for playing God and deciding who gets his kidney. Or the couple that adopt 22 children most of who end up getting pregnant in school, dropping out and living on welfare. These are criticisms I might have come up with myself. But placed in the context of this book (or in my reading of it), they seem petty and churlish, the complaints of armchair critics who do nothing themselves and are quick to dismiss the attempts of those that do. In showing that her subjects struggle with these ideas themselves and question their work and deal with self-doubt, Larissa makes them attainable and more human.