Poor Africa. It must just be really sick of Blake Mycoskie.

"Start Something That Matters"

The guy is sweet, to be sure, or I imagine so: he certainly looks pleasant enough, smiling from the cover of his up-with-the-people, down-with-the-orphans entreaty “Start Something That Matters.”

His words must hang on the ears of many college students, impassioned as they are about his charity. But is his latest effort worth the $22?

Founder and “Chief Shoe Giver” of ubiquitous TOMS, purveyor of horribly unlaced eponymous footwear, Mycoskie has sat down to set down the story of his own personal journey, beginning in the middle of last decade, which would ultimately climax with the founding of a company that has, I’m sure, changed the lives of teenage white girls everywhere.

What has emerged from that memoir-ing urge is this book, a simple and easy thing, liberally sprinkled with lazy quotations. “Be the change you want to see in the world,” Mahatma Gandhi intones from the first page, right after the author’s note that — hey look funky! — is written in loosy-goosey cursive script. How quaint.

The rest grows grating quickly, as Mycoskie balances his narrative impulses against his proselytizing desire:

“Yes, I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that poor children around the world often went barefoot, but now, for the first time, I saw the real effects of being shoeless.”

He’s unconvincing in his sincerity, and what follows is more advertisement than analysis — a letter from the preacher to his choir.

Read and weep at the plight of the under-fed and under-shooed and marvel at how Mycoskie has saved them, all thanks to you the consumer instead you the giver.

The more you buy the more you give. It’s an insidious circle.

And, as it turns out, a boring one, as rendered here in flat, routinely-detailed prose.

“Start Something That Matters” indeed — and don’t read this book.