From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, the last few decades have witnessed a colossal explosion of wealth in the United States, creating a large and powerful upper class. Entrepreneurs with a hefty social conscience-including Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg- have accumulated vast amounts of money, the majority of which  they decided to give away through charitable acts like signing the Giving Pledge.  In order to facilitate this mass giving, thousands of foundations have been created to tackle a huge number of critical issues facing society- everything from ensuring affordable post-secondary education in the U.S., preventing climate change, to implementing global vaccination programs.

In his latest non-fiction book, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age, author, David Callahan, who has spent most of his life in the nonprofit sector, asks some provocative questions about the far-reaching power of living philanthropists and their ability to influence the many facets of America.

“Philanthropy is becoming a much stronger power center and, in some areas, is set to surpass government and its ability to shape society’s agenda,” he alerts the reader in the prologue. “Still, as more mega-donors emerge, with any number of grand ambitions, we need to ask much harder questions about the accountability of philanthropy, which operates outside of familiar checks and balances,” he writes. The Givers, which is based on numerous interviews with top philanthropists, is what Callahan describes as an  “intellectual smorgasbord” where he strives to know more about these “super-citizens”, how they think and operate, as well as their potential broader impact on America and public policy.