The Power of Half: One Family’s Decision to Stop Taking and Start Giving Back by Kevin Salwen and Hannah Salwen

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 242 pages, $24)

For Kevin and Hannah Salwen, a once “incendiary” family secret is not a secret anymore, said Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker. The Atlanta entrepreneur and his teenage daughter have been heavily promoting their memoir about how their family of four decided to sell its grand home and give half the proceeds to an organization assisting villagers in Ghana. Yet for a long time they told very few people about their decision to trade their $1.5 million, columned showpiece for a smaller place nearby. Some friends had seemed spooked by the radical act; at least one close relationship completely evaporated. The family stopped talking to outsiders about the project because they were “tired of feeling like freaks.”

Kevin Salwen comes off as a regular guy on the page, said Courtney E. Martin in TheDailyBeast.com. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, he “toes a very practical line” in explaining how others might draw lessons from his family’s example. Selling one’s house, he admits, is pretty out there. The Salwens did it because 14-year-old Hannah had started pressing for a dramatic gesture after being moved by the plight of a homeless man on a street corner. Salwen doesn’t suggest that other families literally imitate his own. He merely wants readers to ponder “the power of half”—the possibility that they could help others if they considered giving half their TV time, or half their coffee money, to charity.

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“One of the best parts of the book” recounts Kevin’s effort to determine what types of aid actually work, said Bill Williams in The Boston Globe. He prefers programs that give those who are being helped a say in how funds are spent. Yet the book’s major lesson is how generosity can benefit the giver, said Susan Salter Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times. Even if you don’t ultimately imitate the Salwens, “you feel lighter reading this book, as if the heavy weight of house and car and appliances, the need to collect these things to feel safe as a family, is lifted.”