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Book: Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help
Author: Larissa MacFarquhar
Review by: Michelle Nunn, president and CEO of CARE, a global nonprofit with 7,000 team members working in more than 100 countries to save lives, defeat poverty, and achieve social justice.
We are living at a time when the daunting enormity of global inequities have never been more clearly visible to us. Millions of us can, and do, fly off for tropical vacations while millions of others are fleeing climate change, no longer able to subsist as smallholder farmers in Bangladesh or Somalia. These surreal contrasting realities are beamed into our homes and phones daily. We sit for hours watching Million Dollar Beach Houses and then flip to images of a desperate global hunger crisis. Most of the time, we numb ourselves to the unjust ways in which people exist and accept this as normative.
Larissa MacFarquhar’s Strangers Drowning jars us from complacency with an exploration of those rare individuals who act with radical empathy and fight the world’s gross inequities in pursuit of dignity and security for everyone.
The book is a beautifully rendered contemplation of what we owe one another in the world and what living with absolute moral alignment might mean. MacFarquhar weaves together stories of people whose beliefs and actions are in sync, who go beyond boundaries in the pursuit of living for others. They brave jungles to create communities for lepers, risk their lives to deliver aid in conflict and give up their kidneys for strangers. MacFarquhar confronts a world that often marginalizes and even ridicules those who treat strangers drowning as if they are their own.
As we enter 2023 and face into existential challenges to democracy and the sustainability of our planet, this book holds the mirror up to each of us and implicitly asks what it would mean to live undivided lives of radical idealism. It is a timely and worthy consideration, and “Strangers Drowning” is an important provocation as we face the moral demands of our time.
Editor’s notes: Global Atlanta will receive a 10 percent commission on any purchase of this book through the links on this page.
Each year, Global Atlanta asks influential readers and community leaders to review the most impactful book they read during the course of the year. This endeavor has continued annually since 2010.
See last year’s full list of books on BookShop here, and all 2021 reader picks here.
All books were chosen and reviews written independently, with only mild editing from our staff.