The incredible, inside story of the man and the organization changing the way we change the world.

George Soros is well known as the legendary speculator who made a fortune betting against the British pound in 1992, but he is also a philanthropist who has spent billions in order to promote democracy around the world. Morton Abramowitz of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace once said that Soros was “the only private citizen with his own foreign policy.”
Anna Porter has interviewed Soros, his senior staff, journalists, politicians, and many others in an attempt to understand the man. Each person has a unique story to tell. Focusing on the last decade, she explores how Soros’s Open Society Foundations have spread his ideas of human rights, democracy, Western liberalism, and participatory capitalism around the globe. These are the ideas Soros has said he considers worth dying for. How have they translated into reality? What will his legacy be?

Anna Porter was born in Budapest, Hungary, during the Second World War and escaped with her mother at the end of the 1956 revolution to New Zealand, where she graduated with an MA from Christchurch University. Like so many young Kiwis, after graduation she travelled to London, England, where she had her first taste of publishing. In 1968, she arrived in Canada, and was soon swept up in the cultural explosion of the 1970s. At McClelland & Stewart, run by the flamboyant Jack McClelland, she quickly found herself at the heart of Canadian publishing. In 1982, she founded Key Porter Books and published such national figures as Farley Mowat, Jean Chrétien, Conrad Black, and Allan Fotheringham. She went on to write both fiction and nonfiction works, including Kasztner’s Train, which won the Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and the Jewish Book Award, The Ghosts of Europe, which won the Shaughnessey Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and has published four mystery novels. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a recipient of the Order of Ontario. She lives in Toronto with her husband, Julian Porter. Visit her at AnnaPorter.ca.

Anna Porter's profile page

Porter explains the lens through which Soros looks at both economics and politics—the idea that there’s a two-way relationship between cause and effect.

Maclean's

Based on interviews with Soros and his friends, colleagues, and business partners, Porter writes an extraordinary biography of the billionaire, focusing on his legacy.

Publishers Weekly online

"[The Ghosts of Europe] offers a succinct, highly readable, contemporary history, interspersed with interviews with influential national figures regarding past, present and future."

National Post

Buying a Better World

by Sylvia Fraser

In “Buying a Better World: George Soros and Billionaire Philanthropy,” Anna Porter explores a timely subject which, until recently, has been under-reported. How effectively can rich countries and rich philanthropists help the poor, both those under-the-radar in capitalist societies and those in third-world countries? What is helpful and what is interference? Most intriguing: How effectively can politics be exported with foreign aid, either by a country or by a billionaire like George Soros? Porter explores Soros’ Open Society’s efforts to do good while spreading democracy with provocative and surprising results. In many ways, his efforts are a microcosm of the international dilemma faced by the US, as well as Canada and other Western nations, on a country by country basis. Porter has written an easy-to-read book on a complex question. Hopefully it will spur a big conversation about the haves’ and the have-nots in a global world.