http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/10/larissa_macfarquhar_s_strangers_drowning_reviewed.html

Larissa MacFarquhar’s Strangers Drowning is one part modern-day Lives of the Saints, one part confirmation that this is no age for saints. It consists of profiles—many adapted from pieces MacFarquhar wrote for the New Yorker, where she is a staff writer—alternating with chapters describing our increasing ambivalence toward the sort of people she’s profiled. She calls such a person a “do-gooder,” by which she means not just someone who tithes a moderate portion of time or money to charity but rather “someone who pushes himself to moral extremity, who commits himself wholly, beyond what seems reasonable.” Do-gooders are people who give over their entire lives to helping others, even if that means sacrificing some portion of what they give to their own families. And they are people the rest of us tend to find deeply discomfiting. Why?