November 23, 2006 | Read Time: 1 minute
NEW BOOKS
Half-Life of a Zealot
by Swanee Hunt
“I’ve always been a zealot,” writes Swanee Hunt in her autobiography, “championing causes, waving banners, persuading, cajoling, insisting.”
Ms. Hunt describes her life as the daughter of the ultra-conservative Dallas oilman H.L. Hunt and as president of the Hunt Alternatives Fund, a philanthropy in Denver that Ms. Hunt founded with her sister, Helen.
She recalls her early life, as her father railed passionately against Communism and civil rights, and how she moved from a conservative, antiphilanthropy background to using her inheritance to help the needy.
“I’ve rejected most of Dad’s social and political values, while trying not to reject him,” she writes.
Ms. Hunt, who is also the director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, describes the struggles she experienced as a philanthropist.
“Sometimes my life didn’t fit my funding,” she writes. “While my children enjoyed the benefits of private schooling, we supported a dozen efforts in the public-school system. When we wanted to help the new superintendent build trust with the minority community, he arrived late at our meeting because of a demonstration outside his building organized by one of our grantees.”
“Zealots can be blind,” she concludes. “But we needn’t be. We can be open to unexpected pressures that rudely reshape our most carefully constructed world view.”
Publisher: Duke University Press, P.O. Box 90660, Durham, N.C. 27708; http://www.dukeupress.edu; 400 pages; $29.95; ISBN 0-8223-3875-0.
