Strangers Drowning

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

By: Larissa MacFarquhar

Narrated by: Larissa MacFarquhar

What does it mean to devote yourself wholly to helping others? In Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar seeks out people living lives of extreme ethical commitment and tells their deeply intimate stories; their stubborn integrity and their compromises; their bravery and their recklessness; their joys and defeats and wrenching dilemmas.

A couple adopts two children in distress. But then they think: If they can change two lives, why not four? Or ten? They adopt twenty. But how do they weigh the needs of unknown children in distress against the needs of the children they already have?

Another couple founds a leprosy colony in the wilderness in India, living in huts with no walls, knowing that their two small children may contract leprosy or be eaten by panthers. The children survive. But what if they hadn’t? How would their parents’ risk have been judged?

A woman believes that if she spends money on herself, rather than donate it to buy life-saving medicine, then she’s responsible for the deaths that result. She lives on a fraction of her income, but wonders: when is compromise self-indulgence and when is it essential?

We honor such generosity and high ideals; but when we call people do-gooders there is skepticism in it, even hostility. Why do moral people make us uneasy? Between her stories, MacFarquhar threads a lively history of the literature, philosophy, social science, and self-help that have contributed to a deep suspicion of do-gooders in Western culture.

Through its sympathetic and beautifully vivid storytelling, Strangers Drowning confronts us with fundamental questions about what it means to be human. In a world of strangers drowning in need, how much should we help, and how much can we help? Is it right to care for strangers even at the expense of those we are closest to? Moving and provocative, Strangers Drowning challenges us to think about what we value most, and why.

great book, hard to endure

This book is hard to listen to, precisely because it is so well done. I recommend it, but only for people who can tolerate the incredible pain that these people put themselves through in service of their foreign-seeming desire to save the world around them

Profound and heartbreaking

I had no idea what this book was about, or even if it was fiction or nonfiction until I started listening. It was the next book in the queue of my book reading group. Now I plan to buy the book so I can reread the stories and reencounter the questions that MacFarquar raises in her astute examination of altruism. A couple of sections brought me to tears. Excellent reading by the author .

So Good.

An amazing look and not just extraordinary people but the nature of humanity and our mind. I can't recommend it enough.

Beautifully Written, Artfully Reasoned

What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?

The author's voice brings authenticity and intimacy both to the book's stories about individual lives and to its probing analysis larger themes. It becomes clear, in part because of her own reading, that the author cares deeply and personally about the subject. Her reading seems to bring the reader along in her own discovery of these people and answers to questions about what distinguishes radical altruists from others, why such altruists are regarded so skeptically, and ultimately how to lead a moral life. It would be difficult to read (or listen) to the book and continue to live unchanged by it.

somewhat dry but the content is good.

you have to enjoy these kinds of books in order to get through it and enjoy it. its set up as if each person's life is a case study. interesting what different people see as doing good and where they conclude the most need is in the world.