Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 320 pp., $28 cloth.

Written by a Pulitzer Prize–winning husband-and-wife team, this book seeks to galvanize a global mass movement to achieve gender equality in the developing world. By presenting the relevant statistics (of sex slaves, sex-selective abortion, and so on), which are horrifying even at their most conservative; by rehearsing the litany of economic, political, and social benefits that can be linked to investment in women's education and empowerment; by offering chapter after chapter of engrossing and devastating stories (and accompanying photographs) of women threatened by the “appalling realities” of maternal mortality, trafficking, rape, and routine daily discrimination; and by emphasizing throughout examples of women “victims” as well as current “bystanders” in both the developed and the developing world who have become “agents” of change and even leaders of activist organizations, Kristof and WuDunn hope to help do for the international women's movement in the twenty-first century what Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce did for abolitionism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and what Rachel Carson did for environmentalism in the twentieth. “The plight of girls,” they write, “is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.”

Some of the most affecting stories are of women who have responded to personal experiences or observations of rights abuses by becoming social entrepreneurs, such as Mukhtar Mai, a Pakistani victim of gang rape who became an activist with a global profile. Yet many are about women who simply managed to rebuild their own lives. The book opens with the story of Srey Rath, a teenage Cambodian—now a market vendor in the border town of Poipet—who at fifteen crossed over to Thailand for temporary work, only to be taken by gangsters, raped, beaten, and drugged into prostitution. She escaped to the police, who arrested her as an illegal immigrant, and was sold again into prostitution by the officer who escorted her away at the end of her sentence. Rath escaped a second time, and on this occasion found the support of an aid group in Cambodia, which, through a loan of $400, enabled her to start up a now thriving market stall. Half the Sky introduces its readers to many other such stories, while reminding us that these are just a few examples in a world of countless injustices to women.