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The extraordinary memoir of Michaela DePrince, a young dancer who escaped war-torn Sierra Leone for the rarefied heights of American ballet.

First, a confession: I hate-watched the first two seasons of Lena Dunham's Girls. Every situation and character on the show made me cringe. Most scenes involve unpleasant people having unpleasant sex, or scheming to have (unpleasant) sex, or dealing with the discomfort of trying to avoid or distance themselves from earlier, unpleasant sex. Sure there [...]

Today’s blog post is an excerpt from A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity, the latest book from New York Times’ columnist and best-selling authors Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

In A Path Appears, which was released yesterday by Random House, Nick and Sheryl highlight “some of today’s most successful local and global initiatives to fight inequality.”  The book “makes clear how typical citizens can drive the momentum of worthy solutions to our world’s most pressing social problems.”

We are honored that Kyle Zimmer, First Book president, CEO and co-founder, is one of many social entrepreneurs featured in the book:

“While visiting the homes of those children, she noticed that there were few if any books. When she gave some children books, they would confide: This is my first book. That gave her the idea to found First Book, a nonprofit to deliver books to children living in poverty and then encourage them to read. She started the endeavor with two colleagues originally as a hobby organization, but it turned out to be impossibly tough to hire a good manager for it: “We had about $1.30 in our bank account.” So she quit her corporate law job in 1995 and took on the role of chief executive…

There were plenty of missteps. When First Book started asking [publishers] for book donations, Zimmer arranged for a few trucks to pick them up. “I was sitting here thinking I knew what I was doing, and I started rounds of calls to get books donated,” said Zimmer. “The publishers were wonderfully generous, and the fire hose of books for turned on.” First Book soon was scrambling for pickups, larger trucks – any form of transport. When one employee found a distributor willing to transport the books, Zimmer was delighted. But they had some explaining to do when a truck with a beer company logo pulled up in front of the schools to unload boxes of books…

First Book now distributes books to church groups, libraries in low-income neighborhoods, Head Start programs, homeless shelters, youth outreach center, and pediatrician’s officers through Reach Out and Read. After twenty years – and significant transformation – First Book has distributed some 115 million books to 90,000 organizations.* In 2013, First Book accounted for 2 percent of the children’s books distributed in the United States. Not bad for a nonprofit.

*Since A Path Appears went to press, First Book has continued to grow and expand. To date, we have distributed 120 million new books to a network of 140,000 schools and programs.

Excerpted from A Path Appears by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Copyright © 2014 by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Tags: Nick, Kristof,, Sheryl, WuDunn,, A, Path, Appears,, book,, reading,, social, entrepreneurship,, impact

The post A Path Appears appeared first on First Book Blog.

Today, I am sharing with you another story from the book Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Mahabouba did not die in childbirth or due to giving birth, but she did become incontinent. According to Kristof and WuDunn, more than 3 million women and girls are incontinent due to the lack of medical care during childbirth.

Here’s Mahabouba’s (an Ethopian girl) tragic story: When her parents divorced when she was a small child, she was given to her father’s sister, who didn’t give her an education and treated her as a servant. Mahabouba and her sister ran away to town and worked as maids for room and board. A neighbor told her that he could find better work for her when she was 13 years old, but he actually sold her for $10 to a 60-year-old man as a 2nd wife. The man raped and beat her. She got no sympathy from the first wife either, who also beat her out of jealousy. Mahabouba tried to run away, but she was always caught.

She soon became pregnant, and so the beatings didn’t happen as often and she had more freedom. When she was 7 months pregnant, she ran away. She fled to town, but the people said they would take her back to the man, so she ran to her village. She found her immediate family gone, and nobody wanted to help her because she was pregnant and someone else’s wife. She went to drown herself in the river, but her uncle found her and put her in a little hut by his house.

She had no midwife, and so she tried to have the baby by herself, but her pelvis hadn’t grown large enough to accommodate the baby’s head (since she was so young) and she ended up in obstructed labor. After seven days, she passed out and then someone summoned a birth attendant. When she woke up, she discovered her baby was dead and she had no control over her bladder or bowels. She couldn’t walk or stand. The people in the village thought she was cursed, and she should leave. But her uncle was torn. He gave her food and water, but moved her hut to the edge of the village and took the door off so there was no protection from the hyenas.

The first night, the hyenas came. Even though she couldn’t move her legs, Mahabouba warded them off with a stick at 14 years old. She knew to survive she had to get out of the village. She had heard of a Western missionary in a nearby village, and so she crawled for almost two days to the next village, up to the missionary doorstep. The missionary saved her and took her to the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital.

If you want to read what happens to Mahabouba at the fistula hospital or the wonderful work they do there, please buy the book: Half the Sky.

Tomorrow, I will tell you a way you can help girls like Mahabouba.

In the spirit of my blog’s title: “Margo Dill’s Read These Books and Use Them,” I have read the book Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. And I’m going to use it. I’m going to use it to do something a little different with my blog. So, here’s what I am thinking. . .

Half the Sky is an amazing book that will change your life. It’s an adult book, but I think many older teens could read it, too. The subtitle is Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. This book is not easy to read. It highlights some of the atrocities that are happening to women (many of these are actually girls in their tweens and teens) around the world such as sex trafficking, maternal mortality, extreme poverty, discrimination, and more. The book also gives practical ideas to help these women and highlights programs that are working in the world today. You cannot read this book without doing something whether giving money, telling other people, or well. . .doing something on your blog.

I still want to highlight authors and their books and let parents, teachers, and librarians know how to use these books, so I have decided to do two things with my blog: 1. Stick with my original intentions on Thursdays and Fridays by highlighting books, authors, and activities 2. Do something new with my blog on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays by telling stories of women around the world, giving information about different programs to help women and children, and finding easy and practical ways for ANYONE to help–even if you don’t have any money to give.

Now, there will be a few changes in the new schedule in the next couple weeks because I will be taking part in some blog tours. I love blog tours, and so every once in a while if I can’t schedule a blog tour for a Thursday or Friday, you may find an author and his or her book on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. But hey, all the information is useful!

SO, I will leave you with this: In 2006, ABC News did a story on sex trafficking in the United States. (Yes, it is not just a foreign problem.) Here is a statistic from that story that is just overwhelming to me: “The FBI estimates that there are well over 100,000 children and teens in the United States — most of them young girls — being trafficked in the sex trade.” And that’s almost nothing compared to what is going on in other countries around the globe. However, just one teen involved in sex trafficking is TOO MANY. Education is the first step into fighting this type of abuse. I hope to fight it here.

Join me!