Examining the disconnect between donor descriptions of funding to Ukrainian non-governmental organizations as designed to promote encompassing and long-lasting democratic change and Ukrainian perceptions of the funding as a peculiar money flow that was going to a small group of people for obscure purposes, led Pishchikova (Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy) to pose the following blunt questions: "Are the donors blind or do they just not care? Are the locals wicked or just plain stupid? What are the mechanisms that enable the meaningful functioning of a civil society assistance discourse in Ukraine despite negative outcomes and widespread criticisms?" In formulating her answer to these questions, she adopts an interpretive-constructivist approach that focuses on the discourse of Ukrainian assistance recipients and foreign donors, in this case the US State Department and US Agency for International Development (USAID) in Washington and the USAID mission in Kiev, as they talk about assistance to women's NGOs in the Ukraine (the third largest recipient of USAID money after Israel and Egypt). Rejecting (pretty much out of hand) the idea that the funding is part of any imperialist project, she argues that the framing of assistance as a top-down transfer of technical expertise has promoted particular forms of local civic activism at the expense of others and promoted narrowly-defined and disempowering practices with regards to local actors. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)