Chasing Hope
Kristof’s memoir is enthralling and inspirational. It illuminates there are many ways in life off the beaten path. Kristof is the North Star in the world of journalism, an anchor of international perspective in a world awash in sensational, irrelevant news. His memoir is no different, it tells the intimate story of a man with a strong sense of moral duty navigating our messy reality and how he personally tries to pay it forward.
The book is addictive with vivid story telling and introspective reflections on our collective survivors guilt. Perhaps its a forgone conclusion, but the words spring off the page and grips you tightly – as one expects from a Times columnist. His lucid prose shines a spotlight on some of the most neglected parts of the world.
As a regular reader of his weekly op-ed columns on the NYT over the years, it was intriguing to tease out the important influences on his life that has led to his current ideological positions. I must admit, I find my current belief system strongly influenced his politics and beliefs so this was also a chance for me to see where it all came from upstream.
This book is fundamentally about, as the title suggests, Chasing Hope. I am also an optimist. No, I it would be more accurate to say, as Hans Rosling put it1, a “possibilist.” I’ve spent most of my last few years chasing hope in various forms and I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. In light of that, I think I also read this at precisely the right time. Having just come back to Oxford from Nairobi, the book resonated with what I saw and experienced myself. I am currently trying to figure out what I hope to do this year and it served as a reminder that I can be so much more in life than I could possibly imagine in my wildest dreams today. I look up to the life Kristof lives and while my prose may never be good enough to write for The New York Times, I hope I will be able to forge my own path forward of equal purpose.
A must read for anyone ambivalent about their place in the world, feeling that their work isn’t impactful, or want to broaden their view of the world outside the comforts of our city. Especially students who are still deciding what to do with their life.
I am so so tempted to get a stack of copies and start handing it to the half of my friends trying to go into quant, consulting and commercial law…
“People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn’t know about. That makes me angry. I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I’m a very serious “possibilist”. That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.” ― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think ↩