Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 40(2) 404–411 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav http://nvsq.sagepub.com Book Reviews Thomas Adam Buying Respectability: Philanthropy and Urban Society in Transnational Perspective, 1840s to 1930s (Philanthropic and Nonproft Studies). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. 256 pp. $39.95. Reviewed by: Stuart Mendel, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, OH DOI: 10.1177/0899764009351495 Buying Respectability: Philanthropy and Urban Society in Transnational Perspective, 1840s to 1930s by Thomas Adam is an intricately woven composition tracing practices elite individuals in Canada, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States followed to found cherished libraries, museums, and civic and cultural institutions over a 90-year period. Arising from extensive research by Adam, a historian on the faculty first at the University of Toronto and now at the University of Texas at Arlington, the work was nurtured at two conferences of invited papers involving a diverse group of scholars from the United States, Canada, and Europe specializing in philanthropy, the nonprofit sector, civil society, and social history. In the spirit of full disclosure, I attended one of the two international conferences convened by Adam in 2001 and 2005 as a nonparticipating observer. This “fly-on-the- wall” opportunity to watch and listen as Adam and others explored the implications of knowledge transfer by philanthropists greatly aided my understanding of the larger purpose of this book. That purpose is to appreciate and learn from the manner in which the “leisure class” transported ideas from the elite institutions of one or more countries to those of their own. That purpose is amplified in this volume by the nuts-and-bolts story of how 18th- and 19th-century philanthropists used their experiences to inform the creation of institutions in nations with different traditions of institution building. One way to gain the most from this textured, densely packed narrative is to read it as a social history tracing the power of philanthropy exercised not as an outcome of contributed dollars and patronage but more as a function of shared information and ideas across the borders of nations of the northern hemisphere. In this manner, the text falls nicely into a genre of social histories that consider aspects of the nonprofit sector, philanthropy, and civil society in the areas of urban history, social change over time, and the origins and influences of the nonprofit sector in the United States (e.g., Crocker, 2003; Hall, 1982; Hammack, 2003). These works were essentially about people and the manner in which they both adapted to conditions around them and precipitated a change to those same conditions over time. Chapter 2 offers a well-written narrative illustrating these characteristics and the process of transfer carried out by the leading