New this Month: The Blue Sweater by Jacqueline Novogratz

Considering how the last year or so has gone, Jacqueline Novogratz left her job in the financial sector just in the nick of time. That wasn’t what it was about. From the front flap of The Blue Sweater (Rodale): “Jacqueline Novogratz left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty and find powerful new ways of tackling it.”

The result was a journey that would have far-reaching results. For Novogratz herself, obviously, but also for the people whose lives she touched and who touched her and now, with The Blue Sweater, she touches ours, as well because, as empowered as she is and as powerful she has, in a way, become, Novogratz can also write. In The Blue Sweater she brings us along on her personal journey of transformation.

Part of the power in The Blue Sweater comes from Novogratz’s own urgency. “Today, I believe more strongly than I did as a young woman that we can end poverty,” she writes at one point. “Never before in history have we had the skills, resources, technologies, and imagination to solve poverty that we do now.”

Novogratz is the piper. The stories she tells here are her music. And it’s difficult to even want to do anything other than follow along.