Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help

"This book makes me uncomfortable, and not just in that smug way, like saying after a lecture on ethics, “Well, at least I’m struggling with these questions, right?” No, this book — which offers both a history of altruism and profiles of “extreme” altruists, like the couple who adopted 22 kids — makes me question whether I’ve ever done anything good in my life. But Larissa MacFarquhar writes so simply and beautifully that I forget my discomfort and just let her narrative carry me along. In fact, this is a book that would be less upsetting if it never ended, and we could all just live in her prose forever. That way we’d never have to face the upshot, which is that it’s very, very difficult to be a good person."