Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder of The Acumen Fund, a non-profit global venture fund incorporated in 2001 with the goal of using “patient capital” to change the lives of millions living in poverty around the world. Described as a “third way” bridging classic entrepreneurial investment and pure philanthropy, patient capital is used to fund projects geared toward the social good that involve risk and no promise of short-term reward.
Articles by Rick Kleffel
Laurie King, Pirate Queen
Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes are back in Laurie R. King’s Pirate King, but this time on the high seas as well as in dry dock as Mary is shuffled off by a dismissive Holmes to look into low crimes associated with even lower art—the English silent film industry.
Alan Cheuse at Capitola Book Cafe
In Song of Slaves in the Desert, the new novel by Alan Cheuse, NPR’s “voice of books,” one narrative immerses us in the story of a slave family in 16th-century Timbuktu; the other unfolds in the American South before the Civil War.
La Vie En Prose
We make our own lives out of words from the stories we tell ourselves and rarely realize our own good fortune. To understand, we need to see words that describe another’s life and fortune, to see that life from within after having seen it from afar.
Author Daniel Clowes’ Cringe Binge
We adore embarrassment, so long as it is not our own. Those who make us uncomfortable, whose misfortunes are so overwhelming as to inspire laughter instead of tears, are beacons of hope to anyone with anything left to lose. But it takes a consummate artist to create losers we love.
Author Meg Wolitzer in Santa Cruz
The ‘burbs get short shrift in American literature. Many of us live in suburbs, or in small towns that have the same feel as suburbs, but you’d be hard-pressed to find much fiction that does more than simply despise them. Meg Wolitzer understands both the attractions and the dangerous languor of suburbia. The Uncoupling is a gorgeously written hymn that manages to capture the charms these neighborhoods hold for their residents.
T.C. Boyle in Capitola March 7
T. C. Boyle poses difficult questions that he knows will involve answers that are entertaining and thought-provoking—but never clear. He’s an ardent researcher and an intuitive writer. He lives in the spectrum between the two and knows better than most that man and nature are a continuum. Where one ends and the other begins depends on who’s asking the question, and that’s where Boyle starts having fun. His new novel, When the Killing’s Done, is a powerful, bleakly humorous adventure that pits Alma Boyd Takesue, a National Park Service biologist, against Dave LaJoy, an animal rights activist.
Peggy Orenstein Battles The Pink Robot
Peggy Orenstein admits that her behavior on the subject of princess culture has been “hypocritical, inconsistent, even reactionary.” But she didn’t take it kindly when her expensive pediatric dentist asked her 3-year-old daughter to “sit in my special princess throne so I can sparkle your teeth.”
