Buying a Better World

Overview

The incredible, inside story of the man and the organization changing the way we change the world.

George Soros is well known as the legendary speculator who made a fortune betting against the British pound in 1992, but he is also a philanthropist who has spent billions in order to promote democracy around the world. Morton Abramowitz of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace once said that Soros was “the only private citizen with his own foreign policy.”

Anna Porter has interviewed Soros, his senior staff, journalists, politicians, and many others in an attempt to understand the man. Each person has a unique story to tell. Focusing on the last decade, she explores how Soros’s Open Society Foundations have spread his ideas of human rights, democracy, Western liberalism, and participatory capitalism around the globe. These are the ideas Soros has said he considers worth dying for. How have they translated into reality? What will his legacy be?

Reviews

"[The Ghosts of Europe] offers a succinct, highly readable, contemporary history, interspersed with interviews with influential national figures regarding past, present and future." 

National Post

Porter explains the lens through which Soros looks at both economics and politics—the idea that there’s a two-way relationship between cause and effect.

Maclean’s

Based on interviews with Soros and his friends, colleagues, and business partners, Porter writes an extraordinary biography of the billionaire, focusing on his legacy.

Publishers Weekly online

About the Author

Anna Porter

Posted by Kendra on December 6, 2014
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Anna Porter

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Anna Porter is the author of many books, including The Ghosts of Europe, Kasztner’s Train, and The Storyteller. She has won many awards for her writing, including the Shaughnessey Cohen Prize for Political Writing, the Nereus Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Award, the Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction, and the Canadian Authors Association/Birks Family Foundation Award for Biography.