In the interests of honesty, I will confess that Kate Holbrook is my beloved wife. My evaluation of this book is not objective. I'm primarily writing this because I suspect the book might otherwise miss the Mormon audience.

The book started as a course that Kate co-taught with Brian Palmer, at the time a lecturer in Harvard's Religion Department. She and Brian both won the Levinson Teaching Award (only one per year per category in the entire Faculty of Arts and Sciences) for the course (Kate for "teaching fellow" and Brian for "junior faculty"). The idea behind the course was a novel approach to pedagogy and to the big questions. Brian is openly activist and feels that traditional formats of teaching do little to affect the core intellect (and soul) of students. Kate is a kindred spirit, and from their collaboration was born Personal Choice and Global Transformation a religion elective that ended up competing with the largest courses on campus.

The approach for the course was to invite prominent thinkers, activists, politicians and interview them informally as a large body of students. The interviews were videotaped, and as the course became something of a phenomenon (NY Times wrote about it and a couple of the arch-conservative blogs complained about it), Kate and Brian (and their coeditors, the filmmakers who were making a documentary of the course) decided to collect the transcripts of the most relevant, readable interviews for a book.

Thus was born Global Values 101. Interviews include Paul Farmer (our generation's Albert Schweitzer), Aaron Feuerstein (the Polartec CEO), Howard Zinn (the major revisionist historian and an amazingly elegant and gracious man), legal scholars whose names will be less familiar off the east coast, Noam Chomsky (world's most famous linguist and "amateur" political philosopher--he's probably the smartest man I have ever met: I took his last undergraduate syntax seminar in the early 90s and am still in awe of him), Robert Reich (gracious politician and political scientist who was in Clinton's cabinet) and several others. Topics are broad-ranging but relevant. Education reform, global health, corporate responsibility to the worker, international diplomacy, disaster relief and human rights.

I like the book because it taps into a personal connection with these people who are actively changing the world. Though it's more inspiring to talk with them directly, these interviews do give a sense for what they're about and are great inspirational fun.

The course and the book ended up with a fairly liberal slant, and Brian's introduction is pretty stridently Progressive. The audience most likely to love this book is based in the blue states. But there are several careful analyses that are relevant and potentially interesting to more conservative audiences (though I would recommend they skip Brian's introduction to avoid getting bothered about it).

The reason I think this is relevant to AML is that Kate is a devout Mormon and she feels that the course and the book express key aspects of her faith and experience of the Gospel.

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Sam Brown
January 17, 2006