Half the Sky: the key criticism

The author of the book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide recently had another article in the New York Times talking about foreign aid efforts by amateurs.

This piece in Foreign Policy magazine seems like a great way to capture my concerns about the book as well as the article:

The world of aid has spent the last 50 years grappling with these questions. The development industry is by no means perfect, but it has made progress and learned valuable lessons. The lessons are often ignored by newcomers, and the same mistakes are made over and over again. Kristof nods toward this fact while breezing past it. He focuses on the passion and indignation of his heroines while downplaying their technical abilities.

While well-intentioned, the book seemed to repeat an awful lot of the mistakes that even I (although definitely not an expert on foreign aid) had heard development organizations previously discover and announce to be failures or even counterproductive.