Unleashing that process globally is not only the right thing to do it’s also the best strategy for fighting poverty. Countries such as China have prospered precisely because they emancipated women and brought them into the formal economy. Throughout much of the world, the greatest unexploited economic resource is the female half of the population. More girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they are girls, than men were killed in. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, take us on a journey through Africa and Asia to meet an extraordinary array of exceptional women struggling against terrible circumstances. It outlines some of the most serious problems facing women throughout the.

They make clear how so many people have helped to do just that, and how we can each do our part. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting team, husband and wife Nicholas D. Half the Sky is about unlocking the greatest untapped resource on Earth: women. Through these stories, Kristof and WuDunn help us see that the key to economic progress lies in unleashing women’s potential. Half the Sky is a groundbreaking, eye-opening book, stunning in every sense. Half the Sky is the most important book that I have read since Rachel Carson s Silent Spring, published in 1962. A Zimbabwean mother of five, counseled to return to school, earned her doctorate and became an expert on AIDS. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have certainly written such a book. The Ethiopian woman had her injuries repaired and in time became a surgeon. That Cambodian girl eventually escaped from her brothel and, with assistance from an aid group, built a thriving retail business that supports her family. They show how a little help can transform the lives of women and girls abroad. Drawing on the breadth of their combined reporting experience, Kristof and WuDunn depict our world with anger, sadness, clarity, and, ultimately, hope. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold into sex slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered devastating injuries in childbirth.

From two of our most fiercely moral voices, a passionate call to arms against our era’s most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world.

Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof