Title: Essential if depressing reading
Review: Anyone who is involved in the "development business" should read this book. As one would expect from this author, it's well-informed, beautifully written, and entirely persuasive. It's also brief enough to read in one session, by the end of which one is devastated by the realization that, whoever "development" benefits, it certainly isn't the poor (or any other currently fashionable "target population"). I wish that I had had the skill, at some point during my 35 years trying to help people in developing countries, to marshall these arguments and try to convince the remote decision-makers that process and buzz-words only take one so far - eventually one has to provide poor people with what they themselves need, want and value. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that the international bureacracy will ever read this book or take its lessons to heart - but they should!
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