Philanthropy:One of the most impressive people I have ever met is a former New England farmer who gave up the good life many years ago and went to live in Vietnam.
There Mark Conroy applied the talents he had learned on the land to help impoverished peasants. Relying on small donations, he built dry brick structures with toilets for less tha€1,000 each to replace peasants' hovels made from tarpaulin.
The premise of Bill Clinton's book is that there are many thousands such people doing good things in the world, and millions more supporting them financially. There has been an explosion of private giving of time, money and skills. This is because there is a greater concentration of wealth than ever before, a wider knowledge of the misery of disadvantaged people, and easier access through the Internet to give money to good causes.
In the United States, he reveals, there are now no less than one million foundations or charities, half of them started up since 2000, including the author's own, the Clinton Foundation.
The former US president also credits the fact that we know a lot more now about how to solve the problems of the world. He gives over 100 examples. Some people capitalise on their celebrity status, like tennis star Andre Agassi, who created a pre-college academy in Las Vegas for at-risk kids, or the television personality Oprah Winfrey, who built a €30 million school for impoverished girls near Johannesburg.
Others use professional skills to relieve suffering, such as Dr Paul Farmer, who grew up in a Florida trailer park and devotes his life to providing first-class medical care in clinics in Haiti and Rwanda.
Then there are the exemplary rich, like Zell Kravinsky of Pennsylvania, who gave his $45 million fortune to health-related charities and then donated one of his own kidneys to a stranger, and the practical foundations such as Heifer International of Arkansas, which provides livestock rather than money to poor families around the world: after getting a goat from the foundation, a Ugandan villager, Beatrice Biira, was within a year able to earn enough money from selling goat's milk to pay school fees for her children.
There are dozens of Irish people making an effort to change the world they live in for the better. When East Timor went up in flames in 1999, some of the first people to arrive were Irish members of Goal, the aid organisation founded by John O'Shea, which rebuilt burned out village homes with timber bought in Indonesia. Many Irish people with construction skills travel to South Africa under an initiative of developer Niall Mellon to build low-cost quality housing to replace tin shacks.
There are a growing number of Irish people solving problems "down the street and around the world", from Carmel Dunne, who started the Ceol project eight years ago to provide music programmes and tuition for the children of Ballyfermot, to former investment banker Cormac Lynch, who founded Camara Education to take in computers discarded by Irish organisations, and refurbish them for schools and colleges in Africa.
IT IS NOT a perfect world and there is scarce mention in Bill Clinton's book of the failings and misjudgments of modern giving. He writes approvingly about the Oprah Winfrey academy for girls without mentioning that the South African government pulled out of the project on the grounds it was too lavish for such a poor country. I recently met a World Bank official who complained that Aids is such a "fashionable" cause that other desperately needy projects in Africa, such as regular hospitals, are often overlooked by high-profile foundations.
However, this is not an analytical book but rather a compendium of good deeds, many performed by the author himself. Unfortunately the cover - of Clinton reaching out to African children - reinforces the notion that doing good means benevolent white people giving to poor black babies.
His chapter on how federal, state and city governments can help is also focused almost entirely on the American effort, and could have been broadened to include one of the most successful government programmes for improving health in the developing world, the export by Cuba of tens of thousands of doctors to South America and Africa. But then that could reflect on Hillary's chances with the anti-Castro Miami vote.
Whatever his motives in becoming a voice for giving, whether to enhance his legacy, campaign for redemption, prove himself a worthy future First Man, or just straight altruism (or all of the above), Clinton is setting a trend for ex-presidents. He is using his contacts, world knowledge, energy, experience and celebrity status to spread the word that everyone should give something, with the reward being personal self- satisfaction.
The size of the donation is not the issue. As Mark Conroy once told me, people might believe a small donation is not going to change the world, but the peasant who gets a new, dry home on the basis of a few dollars doesn't think that way.
Conor O'Clery is the author of The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune, published by Public Affairs earlier this month
Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World By Bill Clinton Hutchinson, 240pp. £20