Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Ratings59
Average rating4
15
Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Ratings59
Average rating4
From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century's great, unequal cities.
In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.
Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter - Annawadi's "most-everything girl" - will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call "the full enjoy."
But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.
With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century's hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.
Reviews with the most likes.
This is a really cool book. It is a true story, meticulously researched, and then written like a novel. While occasionally there are preachy under/overtones, they were not overly distracting. Definitely worth reading!
I really did want to like this book ... And true to the rating, I found it OK. I didn't like it nor did I dislike it. I can appreciate the depth of her reporting and her skill in crafting a narrative that seemed more like a novel, replete with an interesting cast of characters, the treatment of whom Boo resists making heroes or villains out of. But in the end, it never grabbed me.
Not an easy read especially if you've never been to Bombay. Even for those who've lived there, Annawadi is that familiar place that you refused to know more about. Boo weaves a compelling story from real-life narratives of the people she met.
Nothing evokes guilt like reading about poverty on a brand-new shiny e-book gadget...
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89 booksWhether it's a course textbook or a fictional romance, we remember books that impact us deeply. Which books do you remember being forever changed by due to learning something new – either about you...
