Nonprofit
Sardonic and painfully entertaining, Nonprofit is gallows humor for the public sector.
In tackling the bitter subject of nonprofit fraud, Matt Burriesci’s Nonprofit is so agonizingly funny that do-gooders of all stripes will grind their teeth as they blink away tears of laughter. Allowing not a single good deed to go unpunished, the book pillories charity, wealth, and the chaos that happens when the two come together.
“You” are John MacManus, hopeful immigrant from Chicago to Washington, DC. Your mission is to oversee a famous literary charity, Quill & Pad. And to have a baby. Hopefully. But you’re about to receive a shock: Quill & Pad is not only in the process of financial collapse, but it has actively defrauded its tax returns for years. Your board members are as wealthy as they are insane, your sperm count is low, and all of this is somehow your fault.
Nonprofit bristles with the kind of insight that develops when literary talent and jaded objectivity occur in the same place. The nonsense universe of charity fund-raisers, where a dinner for a good cause costs more money than it brings in, is so absurd and tragic that the only option is to laugh. John’s failure to father a child independently and his subsequent emotional crisis mirror the helplessness of his position at Quill & Pad. He struggles to come to terms with his role both in his family and at his job.
Snappy, wry wit and a tone of mild disbelief complement the book’s thesis of absurdity. From John’s rare point of view, the landscape feels realistic even at its most unbelievable. The book’s use of second-person narrative establishes John as an everyman and endows the story with its own brand of weary outrage, as though it were being related by a frustrated insider.
Nonprofit is engaging, hilarious, and viciously intelligent. It is a message in a bottle from the other side of charitable giving, the one that we could call either dark or wildly mismanaged. The fun happens on the blurry gray line between the two.
Reviewed by
Anna Call
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
