Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail, by Paul Polak (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008; $30.95)
review by Jenn Watt, www.rabble.ca


Poor people are poor because they don't have money. It seems pretty basic, but according to Paul Polak's Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail, our theories on solving poverty have become so complex we need to get back to the basics to understand the problem and then to fix it.

In 232 pages, Polak hammers out his matter-of-fact, step-by-step approach to curing poverty in the world and he does it with little attention to the usual –isms and frameworks that can bog down the most eager of activists.

His solution is simple: understand that poverty comes from having no money, recognize that most who live in poverty are farmers on less than one-acre of land, teach the farmers that they can make much more money farming off-season fruits and vegetables, and then sell those farmers low-cost equipment to make farming those vegetables possible.

"Any one of you can learn all of the above by spending one day in a poor village in any developing country and asking ten or twenty farmers why they are poor and what they can do about it," Polak writes.

And he should know. Polak has spent 25 years in the field as owner of International Development Enterprises (IDE), a company that sells poor farmers cheap equipment like drip-irrigation systems for those out-of-season vegetables and treadle pumps for those who don't have money for a drilled well.

IDE has done well over the years, starting with three founders and now employing hundreds around the world. The sales his company has done is the basis for the book — a model of how everyone can win when business models are applied to poverty. Using the story of one particularly successful dollar-a-day client (who is not the exception, we are assured) Krishna Bahadur Thapa of Nepal, Polak shows how a family who started out owning one acre of land pulled themselves out of poverty once the market provided them with the tools to do so.

full review

by Tara Quinn,  www.rabble.ca

What is the role of writers in a country where repression and imprisonment greet efforts to express their ideas freely? The Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, quoted in the preface to Writers Under Siege, is unequivocal: "Literature has to be combative," he states. "You cannot have art for art's sake. This art must do something to transform the lives of a community, of a nation."

The selections that make up Writers Under Siege vary across continents and genres, all chosen by PEN, an international human rights and literary organization. The works range from sparse descriptions of torture and imprisonment in unflinching detail, to poetic levitation — nimble verses of perseverance and hope, like tiny beads of colour on a grim landscape. And the PEN anthology is grim: divided into four sections on prison, death, exile, and the freedom to write, the multitude of measures used to prohibit writers from practicing their craft is appalling.

More striking than the specific method employed, however, is the shared experience of heavy-handed oppression. Despite the different countries and genres featured, this overarching theme renders the four distinctions between sections somewhat arbitrary. Several pieces blend together into a litany of barbaric practices, encounters with corrupt officials, and other state-sanctioned injustices. The message of these writers is not diminished in importance, but it demonstrates that in an anthology with such an overt political message, even outrage can be difficult to sustain.

Yet the successes are no less poignant. Surprising insights abound, and offer alternative ways to think about experiences of repression, imprisonment, and exile. Andrej Dynko, for instance, an editor of an independent Belarusian newspaper, writes of his 2006 arrest in Minsk and subsequent imprisonment for supporting demonstrators camped out in October Square to protest the national elections. He writes of his fellow political prisoners: "There is no grief, no fear. There is a feeling of fulfilled duty. 'Who, if not us?' says the manager from Hrodna, who loaded the trunk of his Ford with ham, cheese and tangerines and, at 6 a.m. on 21 March, set off for Minsk. He reached the square, and was arrested there."

full original review

by Kelly Ward, http://matrixmagazine.org/reviews/

Eve is nineteen, but has yet to experience much outside her sheltered family home in Dorval. She knows she’s different from the typical suburban kids she’s surrounded with; she doesn’t see herself reflected in the straight, white edges of cookie-cutter homes and shopping malls. So when she makes the move to downtown Montreal, to a “homo haven” with roommates Rachel (a poet and grad student) and Seven (a deliciously gorgeous drug dealer), it is as if her world has cracked open to reveal a new plane of existence simmering just beneath the surface of the one she previously inhabited. She negotiates her way through this new world, forced to confront everything from AIDS to homophobia to political turmoil embodied in the 1995 referendum. She also wades through her first real love affair, an on-again, off-again relationship with an older woman named Della.

The core of the story lies in the jealousy, obsession and raw sexuality that sparks and fizzles between Della and Eve. The writer dances the reader just close enough to Della to feel uneasy about her. Eve’s naivety, and Della’s infidelity and instability force the many layers of the story to pivot around this very well-drawn relationship.

For the most part, Whittall brilliantly weaves into the action of the story issues that may stand blatantly at centre stage in the hands of a lesser writer. However, there is more than one exception to this, and moments in which the page seems to devolve momentarily into soap-box can become distracting. Her treatment of the characters’ reactions to a tragic death is one such moment. An entire chapter is dedicated to the long description of a play staged by Seven in reaction to the incident, telling rather than allowing the characters’ feelings to manifest organically through their actions.

In its best moments—in the glimpses of Eve’s dairy-jottings and her obsessive confusion—Bottle Rocket Hearts brings to mind Jeanette Winterson circa Written on the Body with an adolescent, punk-tinged flare. This is a believable, flesh and blood narrator whose flaws make her all the more enduring. Bottle Rocket Hearts is a Polaroid snap-shot of a time and place: a city searching for its identity and mediating its loyalties, a girl looking to do the same.