Some readers no doubt will find portions of Chapter 9, “Let Your Heart Break,” such as her description of how her four-year-old daughter offered up her “special blankets” for the poor particularly treacly (241). Much of this material is deeply personal, sometimes almost discomfortingly so. and family planning overseas, and how gingerly she had to tread even within her own foundation to get people to listen to experts about the benefits of funding women and girls. Gates goes on to describe how her own career led her to fund technical education for girls in the U.S. Part of it is cast in a highly personal, strikingly self-effacing idiom, detailing her quest to build a companionate marriage with her high-powered spouse, and her own campaign to have her voice and her priorities listened to. Her memoir-cum-manifesto is strung along a three-tier track. And while Carnegie used his gifts to institutionalize cadres of male managerial elites, Gates focuses on empowering women and girls to “crack the patterns of history.” As she explains, “When you lift up women, you lift up humanity” (2). While Andrew Carnegie’s much-cited 1889 essay, “ Gospel of Wealth,” issued a clarion call to his fellow millionaires to build institutions such as universities and medical schools, Gates focuses instead on changing values. Melinda Gates’s The Moment of Lift, is a feminist Gospel of Wealth for the 21st century. McCarthy reviews Melinda Gates’s The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World(New York: Flatiron Books, 2019).
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