Nina Munk

Background

Munk was born in Canada to mining executive and philanthropist Peter Munk and University of Toronto professor Linda Munk. She spent her childhood in Switzerland before moving to Toronto for high school. She received a B.A. in comparative literature from Smith College in 1988, an M.A. in French literature and language from Middlebury College in 1989, and, in 1992, an M.S. with honors from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where she was awarded the Philip Greer Memorial Scholarship for outstanding business and financial journalism. Munk is married to the artist Peter Soriano, with whom she owns a townhouse in New York City.

Career

Munk's work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Forbes, and Fortune. Before joining Vanity Fair as a Contributing Editor, she was a Senior Writer at Fortune and a Senior Editor at Forbes. Among other honors, she has won three Business Journalist of the Year Awards and three Front Page Awards. Her article "Rich Harvard, Poor Harvard," published in the August 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, was nominated for the 2010 Gerald Loeb Award and was selected to be included in the The Great Hangover: 21 Tales of the New Recession from the Pages of Vanity Fair.

Munk's latest book, The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, was released on September 10, 2013, and has received a great deal of attention for its critical exploration of our "well-intentioned, but ultimately naive theories about ending poverty in Africa," to quote Publishers Weekly. Even before it was published, the book, inspired by a profile of the economist Jeffrey Sachs that Munk wrote for Vanity Fair in 2007, was the subject of Joe Nocera's New York Times column in which he noted that Munk's reporting "caused her to become disillusioned, and humbled, by the difficulties that any Western aid effort is likely to encounter."

The Idealist has been named a finalist for the National Business Book Award and the 2013 Governor General's Awards, and longlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize. It was selected as a "Book of the Year" by The Spectator, Forbes, Bloomberg, and Amazon.ca, and has received overwhelmingly positive reviews. Foreign Policy magazine recognized The Idealist with a 2013 Albie Award, remarking: "Writing accessibly about development economics is a high-wire act, but Munk accomplishes it brilliantly." In the Wall Street Journal, James Traub refers to Munk's "impressive persistence, unflagging empathy and journalistic derring-do," citing the depth of her on-the-ground reporting in rural Africa. The economist William Easterly, reviewing the book for Barron's, calls it "one of the most readable and evocative accounts of foreign aid ever written," while Howard W. French describes The Idealist as "a devastating portrait of hubris and its consequences." However, some reviewers, while complimenting Munk's "lively and at times, quite funny book," have argued that her portrayal of Sachs is overly critical—she is, to quote Erika Fry's review in Fortune, "a bit hard on Sachs." Sachs himself has reportedly been dismissive of the book. On his WNYC radio show, Brian Lehrer suggests that Ms. Munk is perhaps overreaching when she concludes that foreign aid has been more harmful than good.

Munk's book about the merger of AOL and Time Warner, Fools Rush In: Jerry Levin, Steve Case, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner, was published by HarperCollins in 2004, one of several books that year about the ill-fated business deal, none of which made any bestseller lists in the U.S. or Canada. The New York Times Review of Books called it "the best [book] so far" on the subject of AOL Time Warner, noting Munk's "exemplary reporting" and "lively, lucid writing", and Publishers Weekly said it "provides a thorough recap of the debacle" but "for those who are already well versed on the subject, Munk adds little new information."

In 2008, Munk co-wrote The Art of Clairtone: The Making of Design Icon, a coffee-table book about the celebrated Canadian stereo manufacturer Clairtone Sound Corporation, a company co-founded by her father in 1958. Archival photographs, documents, and artifacts gathered for and used in The Art of Clairtone were displayed in an exhibition about Clairtone at the Design Exchange museum in 2008.

As a sideline to her journalism career, Munk founded UrbanHound.com, a website for dog owners, in 2000. The website led to two spin-off books: Urbanhound: The New York City Dog's Ultimate Survival Guide, co-authored by Munk in 2001; and The Complete Healthy Dog Handbook, written by veterinarian Betsy Brevitz in 2009. But while Urbanhound.com was a critical success, Munk conceded to the New York Times that it never made much money. In November 2009, FetchDog, an e-commerce and catalog company based in Maine, acquired UrbanHound.com from Munk for an undisclosed sum.