In an intriguing blend of travel writing and analysis, moving portraits and comic tales, Stackhouse tells the personal stories of some of the world's poorest people and shows how they are going to end global poverty in the next century. He provides haunting details of lives and communities destroyed by misplaced aid and government interventions. But more importantly he shows how individuals are finding the creativity and means to make their own lives better. Time and again, Stackhouse sees what happens when people have a say in the fate of their schools, forests, fields and governments: they do what no development agency or government mega-project has been able to achieve. They thrive. They may continue to be humble but they are no longer desperate. John Stackhouse's eight-year journey among the poor leads us away from despair. Poverty, he writes, is not an inevitable part of the human condition but a direct result of human actions - and something that can be remedied.