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A deeply reported investigation of one of the most ambitious experiments to end extreme poverty in Africa, The Idealist tracks the celebrated economist Jeffrey Sachs and his widely promoted Millennium Villages Project. For more than six years, beginning in 2006, I returned again and again to rural Africa, detailing the initial success and eventual disappointment of the Millennium Villages Project, a $120 million experiment designed to put into practice Sachs's controversial theories on ending poverty. The result is a powerful, sweeping narrative that has re-ignited a vital and longstanding debate about foreign aid, raised serious questions about the accountability of the Millennium Villages Project and other anti-poverty NGOs, and helped reveal why, for all the billions of dollars spent on humanitarian and foreign aid, we've made so little headway in helping the world's most desperate people.