I had been looking forward to this book for a while, having read a few of the chapters as journal articles. But the book is a revelation. Ferguson, known to many for his deep critiques of international development discourse (particularly in The Anti-Politics Machine) asks us to reconsider the cash transfer schemes that have gained prominence in political debates in the Global South (and particularly in southern Africa) in recent years. He invites readers to see them neither as dependency-fostering giveaways (as opponents on the right have) nor as politically-demobilizing crumbs for the poor (as detractors on the left have). Instead, Ferguson says, "the present political moment reveals that some of the foundational assumptions that have guided critical social theory for generations are in significant ways out of step with our new realities." He argues that the insistence--common to almost all teleologies of modernization--that the only answer to poverty is to get everyone into waged labor has blinded us to more immediate solutions to desperate poverty and massive inequality. There is much more to the book, of course, including an amazing synthesis of Africanist anthropology and political histories of welfare regimes.I was left convinced that I have been harboring a too-constricted sense of the possible. Though I have read or skimmed hundreds of books in the last year in preparation for oral exams and in dissertation research, I have not felt as jolted by a book in years. This is a must-read for historians and anthropologists of Africa, but also for anyone concerned with the urgent work of discerning solutions for the long-standing and global but entirely tractable problem of extreme poverty.