From Publishers Weekly
As portrayed by Washington Post columnist Mallaby, the charming, powerful, Australian-born millionaire James Wolfensohn works to transform the World Bank, of which he is president, from a Cold War dinosaur obsessed with regulations and procedures to an organization that is leanly and meanly focused on getting underdeveloped countries onto the economic grid on their own terms. Without a doubt, Wolfensohn makes great copy: he competed in the Olympics, refinanced Chrysler in 1980 and chaired a variety of top-flight cultural institutions. Mallaby (After Apartheid) efficiently relays anecdotes from each of these periods to reveal Wolfensohn's psychological, professional and intellectual complexion. The brilliant and deliberative leader who emerges has the "10-million-volt passion" of wanting the presidency of the World Bank, and where the book really shines is in Mallaby's ability to integrate the political, social and interpersonal narratives that lead to Wolfensohn's ascension to it in 1995. Mallaby presents Wolfensohn as forcefully advocating self-determination for poor countries (not unlike "feisty" NGO "tormentors" who oppose the Bank's version of globalization), but finds that Wolfensohn has been "obliged to reckon" with the U.S.'s varying agendas "and generally with the shifting appetites of his rich political masters." That's a characterization with which not everyone will agree, but Mallaby forges it with skill, opening his subject to further scrutiny by all sides. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
We often refer to Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when we want to suggest that someone has a dual personality, part of it charming, part of it monstrous. But we tend not to distinguish very clearly between people who cannot help swinging back and forth between the two and those who can alternate at will, and often do so in a quite calculated way. I wonder if Sebastian Mallaby had Stevenson in the back of his mind when he was writing this book, for the World Bank President James Wolfensohn he portrays here appears to be almost exactly 50 percent Jekyll and 50 percent Hyde. Wolfensohn/Jekyll is the irresistible charmer seen at his vacation home in Jackson Hole, Wyo., who can turn bitter foes into best friends (or at least "frenemies") with a single shot of his charisma. Wolfensohn/Hyde is the intolerable monster seen on Wall Street and in Washington, whose egocentric tantrums have just the opposite effect. The moral of Mallaby's story is that Wolfensohn's presidency of the World Bank would have been more successful had Dr. Jekyll been in sole charge. But that may underestimate the usefulness of Mr. Hyde. Wolfensohn's career is an astonishing story in its own right, and Mallaby, an accomplished British journalist who is now a Washington Post editorial writer, tells it well. Born and raised in Sydney, the son of an unsuccessful Jewish businessman who had quit England for Australia during the Great Depression, Wolfensohn was an underachiever in high school but a renaissance man in college. He learned to fly. He learned to fence, captaining the Australian Olympic team. And then, at Harvard Business School, he learned to schmooze. Throughout the 1960s and '70s, he clawed his way up the greasy pole of global finance, working in New York for both Schroders and Salomon Brothers and accumulating not only a substantial fortune but also one of the world's classiest Rolodexes. One of the wizards of the age of relationship banking, Wolfensohn brought to finance many of the skills that his friend Bill Clinton brought to politics -- in particular, an ability to make every contact in a vast network feel loved. Yet mere wealth was never enough for him. Wolfensohn also found time to nurture and then to display his musical gifts. At age 40 he was encouraged by his ailing friend Jacqueline du Pré to take up the cello. Ten years after his first lesson, he was sufficiently accomplished to perform in concert at Carnegie Hall. It did not hurt that he was then chairman of the Carnegie Hall board.In Wolfensohn's philanthropy, too, he hankered after public performances -- and when it comes to doing good, the stages don't come much bigger than the World Bank. Getting there took him slightly longer than getting to Carnegie Hall. Wolfensohn was first considered for the job as early as 1980, but it was another 15 years before he got it. As he pitched it to the key players in the Clinton administration, Wolfensohn plus the World Bank would be a marriage made in heaven: His charisma and boundless energy would be wedded to its resources and global aegis. But despite being called a bank, the institution he yearned to run was in many ways much more like the financial division of the United Nations. Its cosmopolitan civil service culture was a thousand miles removed from the yelling, table-thumping style of the investment banks of New York and London. It was this cultural gap, Mallaby argues, that kept turning Jekyll into Hyde.Outsiders only saw Jekyll. Confronted by the bank's increasingly vociferous critics among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), Wolfensohn listened, nodded, affected contrition, pledged repentance. Confronted by the bank's senior staff, he morphed into Hyde -- bullying, swearing, slamming doors, threatening resignation. Mallaby is full of praise for Wolfensohn in his Jekyll guise. We see Wolfensohn wooing the NGOs, recoiling from the corruption of the Ivory Coast, smelling a rat in Suharto's Indonesia, spotting a success story in Uganda and brilliantly seizing an opportunity in Bosnia, ensuring that the World Bank played a decisive role in stabilizing that shattered country after the 1995 Dayton peace accords.Perhaps most impressive of all is Mallaby's account of how Wolfensohn outwitted his critics in the Bush administration. With some sensationally deft footwork, he managed to weave around Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill (who allegedly wanted his scalp) and to reverse the president's stance on foreign aid (who else could have got Bush and Bono, the Irish rock star turned development activist, onto the same stage?). By 2003 he felt sufficiently secure to refuse requests for World Bank assistance with the reconstruction of U.S.-occupied Iraq.But when he turns to the internal politics of the bank, Mallaby reveals Mr. Hyde. It is not a pretty sight. When Wolfensohn arrived at Jakarta's airport in February 1998, he greeted the bank's director for Indonesia by telling him, "You've really [expletive] this country up" -- no doubt a relatively affable salutation at Salomon Brothers in the roaring 1980s but not normal World Bank parlance. His staff came to dread such storms of profanity. To avoid them, they learned never to voice criticism when the boss unveiled one of his Big Ideas -- of the Bank as a "knowledge bank," of a new "Strategic Compact" with poor countries, of a "New Development Framework." The correct response to such grandiose visions was always: "Yes, Jim, absolutely, Jim."As Mallaby tells it, Wolfensohn was not always wholly in control of his mood swings. I am not so sure. My guess is he was modeling his outbursts on those of the great financial maestro Siegmund Warburg, who had been Wolfensohn's mentor in the 1960s. After detonating himself in mid-meeting and storming back to his hotel, Warburg would coolly ask colleagues: "How did I do?" One can imagine Wolfensohn asking the same question after some of the suspiciously theatrical rages Mallaby describes.Wolfensohn may have felt he needed such blasts to rouse the troubled institution he inherited. The Bank was under fire. Its "structural adjustment programs" -- which involved tightening the fiscal and monetary policies in borrower countries -- had earned it the enmity of many NGOs, which saw it and the International Monetary Fund as the two ugly sisters of globalization. There was disquiet on the other side of the political spectrum too. The Bank's role was to lend capital at affordable rates to help poor countries develop their economies, and since its foundation in 1944, it had made a great many such loans. Yet in many of the recipient countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, growth had been feeble or nonexistent. If critics on the left saw the Bank as too tough, critics on the right suspected it was much too soft, handing out money to corrupt Third World politicians who simply siphoned it into their Swiss bank accounts.Assailed on all sides, the Bank's bureaucrats -- thousands of economics PhDs from all around the world -- hunkered down and got on with what they did best: generating an awesome quantity of reports and statistics. Nothing illustrates more strikingly what a rut the Bank was in than its snail-like slowness to grasp the magnitude of the HIV-AIDS epidemic. In short, the institution needed a shakeup, and Wolfensohn's job was to administer it. This was not something Dr. Jekyll could do. It called for Mr. Hyde.One episode in particular illustrates what Wolfensohn was up against. It occurred at a 1997 meeting of the bank's board, which represents the rich countries that are its shareholders. Wolfensohn went along expecting to give an ornamental clock and utter a few valedictory banalities to Marc-Antoine Autheman, the outgoing French representative. Instead, he was the recipient of an earful of Gallic invective. Having denounced Wolfensohn's "obsessive reference to the exclusive and irrelevant model of the American private sector," Autheman proceeded to recite a bizarre allegorical poem: Narcissus, you complain and praise your imageWhich the mainstream mirrorsOnly Echo Echo respondsBut who . . . would follow you but EchoIf your motto remainsFollow me, Support me, and Repeat after me.No one had any doubt who "Narcissus" was meant to be. But the image of Wolfensohn gazing fondly at his own reflection in the "pool" of the World Bank could be turned around. For if the Bank was a pool when Wolfensohn took it over, it was a distinctly stagnant one. And far from merely admiring his own reflection in it, Wolfensohn had made it his business to stir the pool up. "I say yes, Jim," Autheman continued, "when you care for Africa; listen to the civil society; ask for a new, unprecedented debt relief. . . . But, I say no when you respond to dissent by the threats to resign [and] criticize staff to the point where they feel humiliated." To which the only possible response must surely be: poppycock. If one of its senior directors could come out with drivel like this, the World Bank definitely needed as much Hyde as Jekyll from Jim Wolfensohn -- and maybe more.Reviewed by Niall Ferguson Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Ninety-seven percent of Ugandans live without reliable electricity. One million Africans die from malaria every year, with 90 percent of those deaths in children under five. Those statistics of poverty and suffering were among the compelling reasons for the formation of the World Bank by Franklin Roosevelt, now more than 60 years old and with 10,000 employees. Journalist Mallaby interweaves the story of this nobly conceived effort with the ambitions of Australian-born charismatic leader James Wolfensohn, former financier and the most recent Bank leader. It is the story of politics at its worst, when multimillion-dollar projects in developing countries do little to alleviate its citizens' woes. It is the story of a determined visionary who, without adequate HR and managerial skills, still reached his goals of achieving a truce with NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) and raising the stature of the institution. Celebrity names abound, from the Clintons to Harrison Ford; it is clear that the former invisibility of the Bank has now morphed into high-end prominence. Yet its future, as Mallaby hints, might be somewhat in doubt as he probes "what next?" Barbara Jacobs
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

The Financial Times, September 30, 2004
Sebastian Mallaby's fascinating book on the World Bank is both timely and an excellent read.

Kirkus Reviews, August 10, 2004
A swiftly moving tale of what goes on behind the vaults at the World Bank...

Book Description
Unstoppable force, meet immovable object. Scene: the World Bank, a mighty development kingdom of many fiefs, its ten thousand employees operating in some one hundred countries responsible for tens of billions of dollars in aid to the world's poorest nations. Enter: James Wolfensohn, the smooth global deal maker and power broker of gargantuan appetites who has furiously worked his many connections to become the World Bank's president. Over the course of his dazzling career, Wolfensohn seduced everything in his way-surely the development gurus of the bank would be no different? Even if this wasn't much the crowd for private jets and homes in Jackson Hole, for friendship with European royalty and Harrison Ford, for fencing at the Olympics and playing the cello in Carnegie Hall with Yo-Yo Ma, surely they would see what a noble sacrifice James Wolfensohn had made in walking away from his multimillion-dollar income?

Not exactly. In 1995, Wolfensohn struck the World Bank like a whirlwind, determined to reinvent the institution founded by Franklin Roosevelt and his World War II allies. Never has the World Bank's work been more important, more in the public eye, or more controversial than in the past nine years when challenges from global financial crises to AIDS to the emergence of terrorist sanctuaries in failed states have threatened our prosperity. In Sebastian Mallaby's masterful hands, the story of Wolfenson and his World Bank is a marvelous tour through the messy reality of global development. What John Gutfreund and Salomon Brothers were to the 1980s and John Meriwether and Long Term-Capital Management were to the 1990s, James Wolfensohn and the World Bank are to our time: the emblematic story through which a gifted author has channeled the spirit of the age.

About the Author
Sebastian Mallaby has been a Washington Post columnist since 1999. From 1986 to 1999, he was on the staff of The Economist, serving in Zimbabwe, London, and Japan, and as the magazine's Washington bureau chief. He spent 2003 as a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and has written for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and The New Republic, among others.

FROM OUR EDITORS

James Wolfensohn, the veteran president of the World Bank, has been described as a "a renaissance banker" and "a plutocrat for the poor." Since taking office in 1995, the Australian-born tycoon has reshuffled the priorities of the international organization, refocusing on issues ranging from global hunger and AIDS to Russian debt reduction and world terrorism. Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby presents Wolfensohn as an energetic powerbroker who defies critics as he presses ahead with his critical agenda.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Unstoppable force, meet immovable object. Scene: the World Bank, a mighty kingdom of many fiefs, its ten thousand employees operating in almost one hundred countries, responsible for tens of billions of dollars in aid to the world's poorest nations. Enter: James Wolfensohn, the smooth global deal maker and power broker of gargantuan appetites who furiously worked his many connections to become the World Bank's president. Over the course of his dazzling career, Wolfensohn seduced everything in his way -- surely the development gurus of the Bank would be no different? Even if this wasn't much the crowd for private jets and homes in Jackson Hole, for friendship with European royalty and Harrison Ford, for fencing at the Olympics and playing the cello in Carnegie Hall with Yo-Yo Ma, surely they would see what a noble sacrifice James Wolfensohn had made in walking away from his multimillion-dollar income?

Not exactly. In 1995, Wolfensohn struck the World Bank like a whirlwind, determined to reinvent the institution founded by Franklin Roosevelt and his World War II allies. Wolfensohn embraced debt relief for the poorest countries, put taboo subjects such as corruption on the development agenda, and faced off against the riotous critics of the antiglobalization movement. Never has the World Bank's work been more important, more in the public eye, or more controversial than in the past nine years, when challenges from global financial crises to AIDS to the emergence of terrorist sanctuaries in failed states have threatened our prosperity. In Sebastian Mallaby's masterful hands, the story of Wolfensohn and his World Bank is a marvelous tour through the messy reality of global development. What John Gutfreund and Salomon Brothers were to the 1980s and John Meriwether and Long-Term Capital Management were to the 1990s, James Wolfensohn and the World Bank are to our time: the emblematic story through which a gifted author has channeled the spirit of the age.

FROM THE CRITICS

Niall Ferguson - The Washington Post

Wolfensohn's career is an astonishing story in its own right, and Mallaby, an accomplished British journalist who is now a Washington Post editorial writer, tells it well.

Daniel W. Drezner - The New York Times

In The World's Banker, the Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby gives us a sophisticated, evenhanded take on the bank's last decade of development efforts. To do this without making a reader's eyes glaze over, he marries policy debates to a biography of James D. Wolfensohn, who became the bank's president in 1995. Consequently, a book about economic development becomes intertwined with tales about Wolfensohn's life and times at the bank.

Publishers Weekly

As portrayed by Washington Post columnist Mallaby, the charming, powerful, Australian-born millionaire James Wolfensohn works to transform the World Bank, of which he is president, from a Cold War dinosaur obsessed with regulations and procedures to an organization that is leanly and meanly focused on getting underdeveloped countries onto the economic grid on their own terms. Without a doubt, Wolfensohn makes great copy: he competed in the Olympics, refinanced Chrysler in 1980 and chaired a variety of top-flight cultural institutions. Mallaby (After Apartheid) efficiently relays anecdotes from each of these periods to reveal Wolfensohn's psychological, professional and intellectual complexion. The brilliant and deliberative leader who emerges has the "10-million-volt passion" of wanting the presidency of the World Bank, and where the book really shines is in Mallaby's ability to integrate the political, social and interpersonal narratives that lead to Wolfensohn's ascension to it in 1995. Mallaby presents Wolfensohn as forcefully advocating self-determination for poor countries (not unlike "feisty" NGO "tormentors" who oppose the Bank's version of globalization), but finds that Wolfensohn has been "obliged to reckon" with the U.S.'s varying agendas "and generally with the shifting appetites of his rich political masters." That's a characterization with which not everyone will agree, but Mallaby forges it with skill, opening his subject to further scrutiny by all sides. Agent, the Wylie Agency. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A swiftly moving tale of what goes on behind the vaults at the World Bank, an institution led by a vigorous, cantankerous, and polarizing boss. Australian ex-pat Jim Wolfensohn, writes Washington Post staffer Mallaby, is a "screamer, schemer, seducer; Olympian, musician, multimillionaire; by no means a saint but by any standards a fantastic force of nature." Having survived an excessively bumpy road from The City and Wall Street to Washington, financial mastermind Wolfensohn was in the habit, early on in his tenure, of grabbing passerby executives and wondering aloud why they were still on the staff-when, that is, he wasn't throwing tantrums at his aides and otherwise offending the grim and gray economists of the Bank. Mallaby takes a breezy, human-interest approach to all this, as seems fitting with such a larger-than-life "outsized character pitted against outsized problems." But what is best about this very good work is not its cast of high-flying characters, well handled though they are, but its enthusiastic effort to personify the World Bank, which is a very strange thing indeed; it lends out some $20 billion a year to poor and developing nations, is thoroughly politicized and heavily lobbied, "has more intellectual juice" than almost any other development organization in the world, and seems ready to break into civil war at any moment. Wolfensohn came to a more genteel bank from the Kennedy Center, which he had restored to financial health, and immediately set its staff spinning with new mandates, some of them failures, some of them magnificently noble, such as his efforts to end corruption in the Third World. That project failed, too; as Indonesian dictator Suharto told Wolfensohn,"You know, what you regard as corruption in your part of the world, we regard as family values." Yet for all his difficulties, Wolfensohn has set the Bank on a much-needed new course, even if, Mallaby concludes, "its troubles did not justify the hand-grenade treatment he administered."A worthy essay in institutional dynamics as much as financial history and international development. Sure to be widely read inside the Beltway.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Sebastian Mallaby has done the impossible. He's written a book about global poverty that is an utterly compelling read. Mallaby uses the larger-than-life figure of James Wolfensohn and his presidency of the World Bank to tell the tale. There's intrigue, gossip, color, and humor all mixed in with high intelligence. But throughout there is also a deeply felt desire to do something for the world's 3 billion people who live on less than $2 a day. In writing this wonderful book, Mallaby has helped shine a light on what should be the great struggle of our times.  — Fareed Zakaria

A fascinating, lively account of a man and an institution grappling with the mammoth challenges of poverty, development, and global politics. Sebastian Mallaby's finely etched tale is both troubling and inspirational.  — Robert Kagan