Story Description:
Random House
Publishing Group|February 7, 2012|Hardcover|ISBN: 978-1-4000-6755-8
From the Pulitzer
Prize-winner, Katherine Book, 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, see “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer
people throw away. Aha, 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.
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.
My Review:
Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a work
of nonfiction that is hard to believe.
Realizing that the people in this story are real, the incidents that
took place are real, and the fact that such a horrible slum as this even exists
in Mumbai is hard to swallow. What a sad
and depressing way to be forced to live.
I was utterly
astonished and truly affected upon the realization that entire families live,
literally, in ‘cardboard’ huts. There is
no real protection from the elements or the rats that chew on the children’s
faces as they sleep. As a mother, it
would pain me deeply to be forced to raise my children under such dire
circumstances. When the storms come,
the huts are flooded with raw sewage and the smell is overpowering. Sickness is prevalent and the medical care is
atrocious as the hospitals are filthy dirty.
The condition and health of the women and girls was especially
distressing to me. These poor souls live
in a very harsh and unforgiving environment and one of the poorest of the poor.
There is no escape
for these people, no upward mobility, and no way to advance to get themselves
out of living in this horrible tragic life.
The extreme level of poverty is truly sickening and I’ve been so
affected by this story that it has propelled me into looking at a donation of
some sort to an organization that might be able to help these people.
Katherine Boo has
written a remarkable, thoroughly researched, engaging, insightful, educational,
and informative ethnography of slum life on the outskirts of Mumbai in
Annwadi. Boo’s ability to capture the
devastating toll this type of living has on its inhabitants is truly
phenomenal.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a must
read in order to fully understand the degrading and indignant conditions in
which some of our fellow human beings are forced to live. It has been quite a while where I have personally
been so affected by a piece of writing.
As I finish this review my shock factor is still at its height.
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