Life is unbelievably cruel for many women in the developing world. And while we’re aware of their plight, for most Americans, the problems seem too large and intractable to do much about. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn want to change your mind.

In their pivotal new book, Half the Sky, the Pulitzer Prize-winning husband-andwife reporting team put a face—actually many faces—on the abstract litany of cruelties that beset women worldwide. These tales of brutality, subjugation and sexual slavery could easily overwhelm a reader and leave one dispirited. But they don’t. As Kristof and WuDunn write in their introduction, the story they tell is "not a drama of victimization but of empowerment."

Sunitra Krishman is one example. As a middleclass child in India, she felt moved to help poor children by daily teaching them what she had learned in school. This impulse stayed with her into adulthood. A tiny woman with a club foot, she studied social work in college and as a young adult sought to teach literacy to poor people in Indian villages. Until one day, a group of men who opposed her efforts raped her.

Sunitra realized it would be futile to go to the police. In many parts of the Third World, women who report rape are ignored, blamed for allowing the rape to happen or even victimized again by the police. And in some cases, it’s a virtual death sentence— women who’ve been raped are expected to commit suicide.

"Nobody questioned why these guys did it," Sunitra says. "They questioned why I was there, why my parents gave me freedom.

And I realized that while what happened to me was a one-time thing, for many people it is a daily thing."

Sunitra switched her focus from literacy to sex trafficking and started a school in a former brothel to teach the children of women who had been forced into prostitution. Then she established shelters for children and for women who had been rescued from sexual slavery. She suffered beatings for her efforts, and one man working with her was stabbed to death by retaliating brothel owners. But Sunitra persevered. Working with aid groups and eventually the government, she taught former prostitutes to make crafts, bind books and even work in welding and carpentry fields. Her group has trained 1,500 women and helped them start new careers. Eighty-five percent of the women she has helped have been able to break free of prostitution and not return to that life.

Some of the book’s vignettes are truly heartbreaking. I can easily imagine a compelling movie made from the story of a Cambodian woman who was freed from sexual bondage but who was forced to leave her children behind at the brothel where she had been enslaved. Because she’d been kept separate from them, the children didn’t know her. Time and again, she would leave the safety of her new home and marriage to return to the brothel to call out for her children, only to suffer beatings and threats by the brothel’s thugs.

Kristof and WuDunn tell this story without melodrama or embellishment. It doesn’t need it. The book, in fact, is packed with stories that are no less powerful, simply told tales that become etched in our minds not because of fancy writing or narrative tricks but because what happens in the stories—both the tragedy and the inspiration—simply is unforgettable.

ERIC HARRISON Eric’s career as a journalist has taken him all over the world covering stories for the LA Times, Houston Chronicle and a number of other national newspaper publications. He currently lives and writes from his home in Houston, Texas.