14 of 52 in my 2011 book blogging challenge.
Jacqueline Novogratz once gave a very worn sweater to charity and saw this same sweater years later on a child in an African village. This anecdote gives us the title for her account of a life spent working to empower the unempowered — particularly poor women — in some of the more ravaged parts of the earth.
I have mixed feelings about The Blue Sweater. On the one hand I admire the work that Novogratz describes in Africa, Pakistan, and other poverty-stricken places. I also agree with most of her sentiments about the need to provide work opportunities as opposed to continued dependence on charity for the poor. As I read the book, I sympathized with her mistakes and felt grateful for her successes. I admire the woman. I really do.
On the other hand, I’m not sure how much I admire the book. It took me a long time to feel really involved in the story. I felt let down by the fact that the incident with the sweater was only a minor episode and wasn’t really at the heart of the story. I felt frustrated by what seemed like an endless stream of generalizations. I thought she covered too many places, too many people, and too many experiences for one book. I wanted her to settle in one place and give me more depth of detail on what happened there.
The book eventually weaves a sort of extended narrative later on as Novogratz revisits places she’d been before and gives follow ups on people she’d encountered before, but I still feel it took too long to get there. I wanted a story, not an overview, and I just didn’t feel like I got a story.
I also questioned her fact-checking. At one point she visited Mississippi. As a native Mississippian I can’t say it surprised me that my state was thrown in with the third world as a place where she felt the need to work on improving conditions. It’s a little tiresome to know that we are the third world to rest of the country, but I’m willing to concede the point that we do indeed have the kind of poverty deserving of someone’s aid. I didn’t get really annoyed until she said that she visited the Tunica Casino right outside of Tupelo. The Tunica Casino, as far as I know, is outside of Tunica, which is, last I checked, more than a hundred miles away from Tupelo.
Maybe this is a minor detail, but it made me think Novograzt didn’t do her homework. It made me wonder whether I could trust what she had to say about other places. If she was that confused about where she was and what was going on in her own country after all, do I really trust her to have her facts straight on Rwanda?
Thus, while I think this book is worth reading, I’m not overly impressed. Too much summary, too little story. I wish I could say I liked it better than that, but I can’t. I wanted to like it. I expected to like it. I just could never shake the feeling of being frustrated by the narrative style. I give it a 3 out of 5.
