Kristof is a good writer, but he is never really enjoyable. He's been in the poverty-stricken parts of Asia and Africa for so long that he's become a fanatic about contrasting how bad they have it there with how good we have it here. So while Marty Peretz is a horrible person, this is
right on:
Kristof goes around (the world) looking for human misery, evoking this misery in print and then trying to put his readers on a guilt trip because most of the time there is nothing they can do about this misery. Except maybe send a $100 to some charity or other.
Which is why I nearly choked when I read the first sentence of Kristof's very next column:
I was going to begin this column with a 13-year-old Chadian boy crippled by a bullet in his left knee, but my hunch is that you might be more interested in hearing about another person on the river bank beside the boy: George Clooney.
