"No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy" by Linsey McGoey (2015) provides critical perspectives on the role of foundations, and more generally on philanthropy. However, the book makes a series of questionable linkages and claims, without which it would have been a much stronger book. Attempting to drive home a point with less-than-factual claims weakens the overall argument, which is unfortunate as the topic requires more critical discussion.

Contextualizing philanthropic action:

• "…many philanthropists, both today and in the past, earned their fortunes through business strategies that greatly exacerbate the same social and economic inequalities that philanthropists purport to remedy. The great industrialists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were dubbed robber barons due to the widespread condemnation of their predatory business tactics.Today, some of the world's most celebrated philanthropists, from Gates to George Soros, earned billions through business tactics that have compounded financial instability, eroded labor protections, and entrenched global economic inequalities." (p. 9)

• "Through his foundation, he's [Gates] spent hundreds of millions in tax-deductible grants to convey the public message that aid 'works.' Unfortunately, the belief that aid 'works' is a simplistic and, in many ways, misguided one. It's a notion that diverts attention away from the realities of misplaced research priorities by the world's most powerful pharmaceutical companies, blankets understanding of how trade laws infringe upon national manufacturing and importing capacity, and obscures the role that global financial markets play in creating worldwide food instability." (p. 27)
  

I did not set out to write a critique of this book, but as I read the examples of problematic claims stood out and I began to make note of them. As a result, this is not an exhaustive list, and focuses largely on the last ~75 pages, after which my note taking (frustration) began. Here are a few examples:

• A Gates Foundation "partner" is a company the endowment has invested in (p. 173, p. 216). The author could certainly argue for a different meaning of partnership, but that is not the normative or legal sense of the word.
• Some claims are not well thought out: For example, the author argues that if aid was working well, there would be no need for communications work to promote it (p. 203). This assumes that humanitarian activities in remote areas of places like Ethiopia or Myanmar are accessible and regular reading material of global audiences, and are presented in diverse ways to meet the needs of diverse audiences automatically. 
• Research was presented about GMOs to show its harmfulness. However, (1) the research was not cited, and (2) the research was retracted by the publisher, which was not mentioned by the author.
• A number of the claims made require details and evidence to support them, and broader perspectives to contextualize the extent, rather than relying upon assumption and hyperbole (p. 223).
• Misused quotes (e.g. p. 227). For example, when Gates was talking about Coca-Cola, he was using a supply chain example, not supporting everything the company ever did. He was suggesting there are examples of successful ways to provide goods to all people, not endorsing every action, of all times, that the company has been involved in.
• Misplacing blame: While the spending and practices of "Coca-Coca [sic] and Monsanto's"  is not usually affected by CSOs, the author has failed to speak about the role of national governments - which is crucial - and the interaction that CSOs have with their national governments, which are approving these companies to operate and setting regulations. Much more attention (and blame) must be given to governmental authorities. The author writes as if companies can do anything they want, and work anywhere they want, so long as they do not break a law, and in doing so has neglected governments entirely.
• Odd statements: For example: "Perhaps they were well paid, perhaps they weren't" (p. 246). If it is important enough to include in the book, it is important enough to find out.

The author is making important arguments. And, I hope future work is strengthened so that these important works are not diluted with problematic claims. As it stands, I do not recommend the book.

Hardt and Negri's "Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire" (2004) is a work of political philosophy, and specifically a book about democracy (presented here). Some points raised in the book offer interesting food for thought, potentially of use in the classroom, or for contrasting different opinions, for example:

On the "peasant":

• "It makes little sense to continue to use the term peasant to name the agricultural worker on a massive collective or state farm who owns no property and produces food to be distributed on a national scale. Nor does it make sense to continue to call "peasants" the populations that have left the fields to work in factories. Furthermore, subsequent processes of decollectivization of agricultural production in the post-Soviet and post-Mao eras have in various degrees reestablished private ownership of the land but they have no reconstructed the relations of exchange that define the peasantry, that is, production primarily for the family's own consumption and partial integration into larger markets." (p. 117-118)
  

On GMOs:

• "This question of ownership seems to us the central issues in the current debates over genetically modified foods. Some have sounded the alarm that genetically modified Frankenfoods are endangering our health and disrupting the order of nature. They are opposed to experimenting with new plant varieties because they think that they authenticity of nature or the integrity of the seed must not be violated. To us this has the smell of a theological argument about purity. We maintain, in contrast, as we have argued at length already, that nature and life as a whole are always already artificial, and this is especially clear in the era of immaterial labor and biopolitical production. That does not mean, of course, that all changes are good. Like monsters, genetically modified crops can be beneficial or harmful to society. The best safeguard is that experimentation be conducted democratically and openly, under common control, something that private ownership prevents. What we need most today in this regard are mobilizations that give us the power to intervene democratically in the scientific process." (p. 183-184).